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Dáil Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 28 Jun 1950

Vol. 122 No. 2

Committee on Finance. - Vote 27—Agriculture (Resumed).

Question again proposed: "That the Estimate be referred back for reconsideration"— Deputy Smith and Deputy Cogan.

Last night I was dealing with various aspects of this Estimate and we arrived at the potatoes and oats question. Now we come to milk. It is rather dangerous for any one of us who is not supposed to know anything about it to appear in this discussion, but when one finds that the experts differ as to the costings of milk production I think that Deputies like ourselves might with advantage enter into the discussion. Personally, I never thought for one moment that anything approaching the costings of any article produced by the farmer could be arrived at. Such different sets of circumstances pertain all over the country that, notwithstanding what the experts say, it would be impossible to arrive at anything like a proper estimate of the costs incurred by the farmer in the production of milk.

Because the sets of circumstances are so different all over the country that in my opinion and in my experience it would be impossible to estimate the costs so far as the production of milk is concerned. The one thing I can go by is that nowithstanding all the mournful speeches that came from the far side of the House, about the prices paid for milk delivered to the creamery especially, the rather interesting fact still remains that more milk is being delivered to the creameries now than ever was before. If that is not a sign that milk must be paying the farmers, I do not know what it is. Farmers are not fools and they do not work for nothing. If they are in a position to deliver more milk to the creameries and thereby increase butter production, it is clear that they are not keeping their dairy herds at a loss.

Deputy Corry gave the figures compiled by a certain professor in Cork University. Might I remark that most Deputies on the other side seem to spend much of their time in reading extracts from speeches or statements made by other people? I should like them to give the results of their own personal experience and to look at the situation as it exists, and on that basis we should congratulate all concerned that more milk than ever before is being produced. Deputy Corry referred to the cost of labour and so on, and it is peculiar that one of the first items always mentioned is the few shillings given to the agricultural labourer. Deputy Corry wants an increase in the price of every article in his economy before he can give the few shillings to the agricultural labourer. He wants an increase in the price of wheat and in the price of barley, and considering all these circumstances the milk position is satisfactory. Production has gone up almost by 30 per cent. and butter production has increased pro rata.

I come now to another item in our agricultural economy, tomatoes. Here again Deputies should use their own discretion. This is more or less a new industry, which is doing very well, but the Minister, having the responsibility, must take certain steps in regard to the price paid for tomatoes. It is very hard to please everybody. The Minister, on the one hand, is criticised for allowing the cost of living to rise, and on the other, if he takes steps to keep it steady or to reduce it, he is also criticised. What is he to do? Everybody knows that we do not produce sufficient tomatoes to meet the requirements of the people, and, that being so, it is necessary at times to import tomatoes. The case against these imports is that they reduce the price of the home-grown tomato. As I understand it, they have a preference of 2d. to 3d. a lb. and there will be general agreement that, for flavour, the people prefer the home-produced article and are prepared to pay a few pence more for it. They are not prepared, however, to pay 1/- to 2/- per lb. more and that is where the crux arises.

If, in order that these tomatoes may command that price, a prohibition against imports is imposed, it means that the working-class and the poor people, whose incomes are such that they cannot afford to pay the high price for Irish tomatoes, are deprived of the fruits which nature sends in abundance in other countries. That is one of the things we must get into our heads—that we can produce many things but that there are many things we cannot produce at an economic price. For instance, we could grow oranges in hothouses, but we cannot grow them on the sides of the ditches and in the open as in other countries. We can grow grapes in hothouses, but not as they grow them in France, Germany and other countries, whose climate is particularly suited to the growing of such fruits. If our people are to enjoy these fruits, they must be allowed in here and sold at a price the people can pay. We can sympathise with the people engaged in this industry, but I am sure no Deputy will admit that there should be such a difference in the prices of Irish and foreign-grown tomatoes.

There is another aspect of the situation which seems to have escaped the attention of Deputies. If we go through the City of Dublin and look at all the big shops and at the corporation fruit markets, we will find that 90 per cent. of the articles in their windows is foreign produced. If all these things were cut out, look at the unemployment that would be involved for the people employed in these places not only in the cities and towns but in every village in the country. Deputies who spoke on this matter of tomatoes all point to the employment which is given, but what would happen if the people engaged in the fruit trade were not sure of supplies of fruit of every description the whole year round? We saw the situation during the six years of the war when the shops were half empty. That is a point which seems to have escaped the attention of many Deputies.

There are possibly two opinions about the mechanisation of farming, but farmers are not compelled to use machinery, if they do not wish to do so. They can keep their horses, and on small farms I suppose it will be necessary to keep horses for ploughing the land, but if there are farmers, as there are many, who wish to adopt mechanical methods instead of the old methods, they are quite entitled to do so. We must bear in mind that times are moving. Many years ago, we had the old billhook and scythe. Then came the reaper and so on—all these periods brought different changes. We cannot go back to these days and it is up to the farmers themselves to decide what class of machinery they will use in the working of their farms.

We are not living in normal times. The situation as regards agriculture and industry is changing every day. You cannot deal with agriculture by means of figures on a blackboard. There will be ups and downs, no matter what precautions are taken by a Minister for Agriculture or by any Government. It is impossible to guarantee a price to the farmer for everything he produces. We might as well admit that and not try to deceive ourselves and people down the country. Certain risks must be taken in everything.

On the whole, the farmer knows his business best and he is being given a free hand. He can grow as much wheat as he likes, according to the nature of his land, and he can grow as much oats as he likes. He can grow as much barley and raise what he likes because he is his own boss. When all is said and done the farmer is the best judge of these things. The Minister has said that over and over again not only in the House, but in speeches throughout the country. Instead of being opposed to a tillage policy he has urged the farmers to go in for more tillage, more cattle, sheep and poultry. That is the aim of the Department of Agriculture in these matters and that should also be our aim. Although there may be some things that could be, and ought to be, criticised we should take the long view of income from agriculture and we will find that income in the past two or three years has been greater than in any of the years previous to the coming into office of the present Government. Therefore, I think that, in view of the fact that there is so much at stake and that so much money is to be expended in the improvement of agriculture, if that money is to be expended wisely and well it will require the co-operation of all the farmers in the country as well as the Deputies on the opposite benches. Instead, therefore, of criticising the whole system the Deputies on the Opposition Benches, and partiticularly Deputy Smith, should go out into the country and encourage the farmers to engage in, and participate in, the schemes which are going on and which will have beneficial results for the farmers of the country.

Listening to the debate on this Estimate, to the criticisms of it, and to the stream of praise from the Government Benches by Deputies behind the Minister I think it would have to be agreed that that whole stream of praise boils down to the one question of the price which the Minister has got for cattle. We in the West of Ireland are not concerned so very much with ranching and the supply of beef to England. We are more interested in mixed farming, which is the basis of the farmers' economy in the West of Ireland. The price of beef may very well be a big matter for the ranchers of Meath and Westmeath, but the small farmers of the West of Ireland are very much more concerned with the prices they get for milk, butter, eggs, potatoes, oats, barley and to a small extent wheat.

The average number of calves in the West of Ireland would not be more than three and that does not affect the economy of the farmers there. All the Deputies sitting behind the Minister wound up their speeches with great praise for the Minister and the price which he got for cattle. Even Deputy Dunne when advocating increased wages for agricultural workers could only point to the great price for cattle in support of his arguments. In the long run we have to ask ourselves whether it is sound policy to turn this country into a large ranch for the supply of beef to England? Is it a sound policy to do away with the small farmers and to turn the whole country into ranches, because that is the policy which is being pursued at the present time. I maintain that that is not the wisest policy for this country. It is all very well for Deputy Coburn to shout about the amount of money that is going into the farmer's pocket for cattle and about the amount of money being spent on land development and the making of large ranches. It was not for that that men went out to fight, but to place the land of the country in a position where it was most suited for those who lived on it and to put as big a number of people as possible on to the land. They fought to do away with the system of ranching that obtained in this country for generations and which had been the curse of this country.

In the case of the price being paid for milk I would ask the Minister what justification there is for asking the farmer to take a lesser price for milk than he was getting for the last few years. What other commodity has gone down in price? Can the Minister or any Deputy in this House name one commodity, for which the farmer has to pay, which has gone down in price? Why then should the farmer be the first person to be asked to take a reduced price for milk? If the Minister can give any justification for that situation I would be glad to hear it, but I maintain that there is no justification whatever for it at least until such time as everything else goes down in price as well. The farmer should not be the first to be asked to accept reductions in prices.

It has been admitted by the Minister himself that the economic price of butter at the present time is 3/6 a lb. and the insinuation has been made that the farmer is getting a subsidy on butter. The farmer is getting no subsidy whatever. If it costs 3/6 to produce a lb. of butter then it is obvious that the consumer is getting a subsidy and not the farmer but yet the farmer is being asked to produce butter at less than the economic price.

The same thing applies to eggs. For a number of years the farmers were getting 2/6 a dozen and the Minister is now asking them to produce eggs for 2/- a dozen for five or seven months of the year and 3/6 a dozen for the five remaining months.

The Deputy has found the month that Deputy Ormonde lost.

We will give you a present of that one, and perhaps you may make it up for the difference in the loss of price. I wonder what the Labour Party thinks of this situation. We are asked to supply eggs during the plentiful months at 2/- a dozen and when there are no eggs in the country we will be paid 3/6 a dozen for them. What results will that have for the labouring men of the country? What chance will they have during the last five months to buy eggs when there will be no eggs available in the country? I think the much wiser course would be to have the same price obtaining in the country the whole year round and thus enable the poor men to get the eggs just as well as the people in England.

Deputy Coburn mentioned machinery versus horses. If I were a young man I suppose there would be no one more anxious than I would be to get a tractor and to do away with horses for ploughing my land but I wonder is it a wise course. I wonder is this country suited for that type of work. In my opinion, the horse is the most suited to the country. As everyone here knows, our land is damp and our climate is damp. My experience is that heavy tractors simply steam-roll the land into weeds. In case of emergency, where would the tractors come from, where would the rubber and the oil for those tractors come from? It is a most unwise course to do away with the horse. We would be far better off by depending on our own horses and machinery rather than by doing away with the horse and turning the country into ranches again.

Under the land rehabilitation scheme, £150,000 has been spent on the purchase of huge machinery from the United States of America. Would the Minister not think that it would be far wiser to spend that £150,000 in giving employment on the land to men who are forced to emigrate from the West of Ireland and to leave these big machines where they are? Would it not be wiser policy to let the men work on these drainage schemes and the land rehabilitation scheme than to spend that £150,000 on it?

Is it not true that you had to suspend schemes in Sligo because you had not men to work on them? Is not that true?

They were all gone.

Is not that true?

The men who were working on the turf development scheme were all gone since the Minister closed down the scheme.

Do not be such an old fraud.

It is not true. There were piles of men and there were piles of men prepared to come back.

Do you deny that?

I will show it to you in the paper.

You can get anything you like on paper. I know the men are there because, no later than yesterday morning, before I left home, there were three men with me looking for work.

I will show you Eugene Gilbride stating to the county committee of agriculture that there are no men.

If you do show that I said that, I will withdraw every word I ever said. I can assure you I never said it.

Were you at the meeting when it was said?

That is another story.

Were you?

The Minister has said that I made a statement at the meeting that there were no men to be had. Does the Minister withdraw that statement?

I do not.

I deny it, so, and I deny that I could say it because, as I have already said, before I left home on Tuesday morning, there were three men at my door looking for work.

To come back to the question of importing huge machines, we pay away this £150,000 for huge machinery while at the same time we export the best youth of our country. I know men who spent the best years of their lives in England and America to earn far less than the amount we spent on huge tractors and who are glad to come home and buy the little despised farms that we hear so much about and spend the remainer of their lives in Ireland on those farms. Would it not be much wiser to give these men a chance of earning that money here? Is it a wise policy to spend money in America and England on huge machinery and to export young men to go into the mines and factories in New York and other places to produce them? I say it is not. This business of going in for big machinery is all a cod and is not suited to the country.

The same thing applies to flour. A very interesting White Paper was issued by the Minister. Deputy Coburn accuses us of not reading it. I read a little of it. I see in one column where we are compelled, as a result of our acceptance of Marshall Aid Funds, to buy white flour from America. Does the Minister deny that?

Glory be to God.

Does the Minister deny that?

If the Deputy wants interruptions we will never get the debate finished.

I am getting interruptions.

The Minister can reply when he is concluding.

The Deputy gets interruptions when he does not want them and when he wants them he does not get them.

The position is that, according to this White Paper, we are compelled to buy white flour as part of our Marshall Aid. I hope that Labour is satisfied with that. I hope that Labour is satisfied with closing down our mills and buying the flour with borrowed dollars.

Borrowed? Read that again.

Yes, borrowed.

Read it again.

Of course, the Deputy knows it is not true.

Yes, borrowed.

The Deputy has not read it.

The Minister promised maize at 20/- a cwt. It is now in every shop in the country at 32/-. According to page four of the White Paper the millers are protected. I will read it for the Minister for fear he might forget what he had printed:

"...Increases in the wholesale and retail prices of maize and maize products were prohibited until after the latter date. Special arrangements were made whereby rebates would be granted to millers who had to use maize costing £26 per ton to meet customers' normal requirements during the period 30th March to 27th April, 1950."

I wonder are these the same millers, the friends of Fianna Fáil, who lined their pockets for the last number of years, in respect of whom the Minister was so anxious to ensure that they would not suffer anything by selling maize at less than £26 per ton. It is wonderful how people change. I would not be surprised at any change. I even heard the Minister, in his opening statement, thanking God that the British market was gone.

We may now proceed on the assumption that the Deputy has gone daft and I am exonerated from further correction.

The Minister, in his opening statement, dealing with shorthorn cattle, said that he was at one time worried that all our shorthorn cattle were gone.

But now the market in England for shorthorn cattle was gone and he thanked God for it.

Shorthorn heifers. He shouted: "Up the Republic," as well.

I would not be surprised to hear him singing the Soldier's Song. We were promised cheaper manures. That never materialised. Deputy Coburn said that the Irish farmer was prepared to produce the food if he got a lead. I agree with that. The Irish farmer will always come up to the mark if he gets a lead but, in my opinion, the man who gives the Irish farmer a lead in agriculture must be sincere in that. I do not believe that the Minister could be sincere because, at all times, the Minister made no secret of the fact that he did not believe in producing wheat or beet or any of these things in this country. He said on one occasion that he thought the best thing for this country would be to maintain about 1,000,000 of a population and that it was the ideal thing to rear 20 of a family and to export 19. A man who believes that could not be expected to be sincere in asking the people of this country to produce food in order to keep the people at home.

I do not blame the Minister because I think he believes that sincerely but the people who knew that and who placed him in charge of the agricultural policy are, in my opinion, the people who are responsible. It is no good for Deputies to criticise the present agricultural policy or to say that something was not done that will have to be done. There is no use in getting up and saying it. As Deputy Coburn said, if the people get a lead, they will do it. The lead the people got was that the growing of wheat and the growing of beet was all cod. On the 12th June, a Parliamentary Secretary of this Government spoke down the country and advised the people to grow wheat. On the 12th June! If that is the time to give people a lead in so far as the growing of wheat is concerned, I must say that it is something I have never heard of before. It is rather a strange time of the year to give that lead. We may be a bit backward in the West but we generally sow our wheat before 12th June. If the people get a lead they will do these things but the man who will give that lead must be sincere himself in regard to what he is about. The Minister is not sincere when he asks the people of this country to produce these things, because he does not believe in them. I believe that this Estimate should be referred back because we have received no statement as to our future policy. We do not know whether it is the intention of the Government to give a fair price for milk and we do not know whether it is the intention of the Government to do away with the two prices for butter, tea and flour.

I heard the Minister say in this House yesterday, in answer to some Deputy, that more wheat was sown in the country this year than ever before. I hope that is so but I must say the Minister's statement struck me as being very peculiar because the tillage return has not been taken at all yet around my part of the country. I do not know in what other way the Minister gets his information except from tillage returns. I am sorry that I cannot agree with him in regard to his statement that more wheat has been sown this year in this country than ever before because, from what I have seen in my travels in the West of Ireland and in the Midlands, not nearly the same amount has been sown this year as was sown in other years. As I say, I hope I am wrong.

Has the Minister got the cereal acreage for the year?

I have the sales of seed.

That is no indication at all. There is no guarantee as to what a man will do with seed.

Could the Minister give us an estimate of the total cereal acreage from the sales of seed?

I am trying to fall in with the direction of the Ceann Comhairle.

I am sure the Ceann Comhairle will permit the Minister to give us the approximate estimate— even if it is within 10 or 15 per cent.

If the Deputy in possession gives way and if the Minister desires to do so.

I shall in a moment. Meanwhile, let the Deputy continue.

The Irish farmer wants continuity of policy. If he is going to be asked one day to grow wheat, oats and potatoes and then told the next day that it is all a cod, he cannot be expected to settle down to a general policy.

The land rehabilitation scheme is not a good scheme for the West of Ireland. The farm improvements scheme was much better suited to the West of Ireland. If the Minister reads some of the statements made by people who are supporting him he will find that, for instance, Deputy Desmond told him what I am telling him now, that is, that the land rehabilitation scheme is not a suitable scheme for the small farmer.

May I interrupt the Deputy and offer him the estimate of wheat acreage?

Of all grain?

The three cereals?

I shall try to get the estimate for the other two cereals. One estimate is that we would put wheat at about 390,000 acres.

That is only an estimate on the amount of seed sown.

Is it not the best I can do for you?

I am thankful to the Minister for going out of his way to do so. However, wait until the tillage return becomes available. I am comparing that figure with what I see around the country and with the knowledge I have in regard to the matter. In my opinion, the farm improvements scheme was a far better scheme for the small farmer.

May I again interrupt the Deputy to give him this very approximate figure of about 150,000 acres of barley? Oats we would not undertake to predict because we have virtually no check on the seed basis and, therefore, we would not predict until the approximate figures come in.

With regard to the sowing of these crops I want to deny emphatically the statement made by Deputy Coburn. I find that the statement is being made all over the country that Fianna Fáil were trying to sabotage the growing of wheat and the growing of any other crops in this country. That statement is a lie. I think that there is an old saying to the effect that if you tell a lie often enough you will begin to believe it yourself——

Is that in order?

——and you must be getting into that groove.

On a point of order, is it in order to say that Deputy Coburn told a lie?

The Deputy does not agree with what Deputy Coburn said.

Deputy Gilbride did not attribute that statement to any particular Deputy.

I am on my feet.

I am on mine, too.

Deputy Sweetman rose first and he is entitled to be heard on a point of order.

For how long?

That is a matter for the Chair.

On a point of order, Deputy Gilbride mentioned that what Deputy Coburn had said was a lie.

That is not in order.

Deputy Gilbride made a statement that——

Deputy Gilbride should withdraw the word "lie".

The statement referred to by Deputy Gilbride was not attributed to Deputy Coburn at all.

I said I wanted to deny a statement made last night by Deputy Coburn because——

Will the Deputy withdraw the statement that Deputy Coburn told a lie?

I did not say that he told a lie. If the Chair thinks that I did, I withdraw it.

I want to repeat that I did not say that. What I did say was that the statement made by Deputy Coburn and Government supporters all over the country is a lie.

Does that satisfy Deputy Sweetman? I repeat that it is a lie.

What about Tuam beet?

There will be very little employment in Tuam if you carry on as you are.

Why do you not grow beet up there?

I want to say again that that statement is a lie. Fianna Fáil were responsible for getting wheat and beet and all these other crops sown in this country when they had the opposition of the present Minister and his supporters.

I have not had an opportunity of hearing very much of this debate for one reason or another over the past few days, but such time as I have spent in the House this morning and what I have been able to read of the statements made by the members of the Opposition gives me to think that it is time they got some sort of agreement amongst themselves in regard to agricultural policy in this country. I think it is a very bad thing that criticism on an Estimate like this should be based upon what appears, to me at any rate, to be personal dislike of the Minister. I think it is a very bad principle. The present Minister for Agriculture, while his personality may not appeal to everybody, has done one thing with agriculture, in my view, and that is, he has brought into it a degree of vigour and imagination and virility which we had not noticed before being employed by any previous Minister, and that in itself is a good thing. It is a stirring of life, and every stirring of life that we see must necessarily be good, even though all its results may not eventuate in the end which is desired.

I want to address myself to one or two aspects of the agricultural policy of the Minister which affect myself and my constituency particularly. The first one, to which I have adverted here on many an occasion, is the question of agricultural wages. In this House we have heard, and we hear daily, of the hardships and the woes of the farmers. I suppose that is only natural, because of the preponderance of representation there is in the House of the farming community. I do not think there is enough care or thought or consideration given to the lot of the agricultural worker. I think that lack of care is attributable to the fact that, as a political factor, from the numerical point of view, agricultural workers are in the minority as compared with the farmer owners of land. The fact that they are in a minority numerically should not prompt the Minister or Deputies to give them less consideration than they are entitled to.

The Minister, on taking over office, indicated that he was proposing to bring the wages of agricultural workers to £3 a week, and that was done. I do not think the Minister, or any person who has any knowledge of the difficulties of life in rural Ireland or the cost of living difficulties of the farm labourer, will contend that £3 a week in this day and age is sufficient to enable a man to live in decency and comfort. In 1939, before the war, and before the cost of living sky-rocketed under the Fianna Fáil Administration, £3 a week might have been a wage on which a man could possibly get by, but it is far and away from being an adequate wage nowadays for any man to live on, much less a man carrying the responsibility of a family.

There has not been any increase for agricultural workers during the present year. When you contrast that with what was announced by the Minister when he was introducing his Estimate, of the improvement in the position so far as the farmers are concerned, the improvement in certain agricultural prices and the increase in the agricultural income of the farmers, it is very difficult to reconcile it with the continuing low wage of the agricultural worker. The Minister should take some initiative in this matter and he should bring to the notice of the Agricultural Wages Board the desirability of having something done immediately in connection with agricultural wages. In my constituency the minimum agricultural wage laid down by the Agricultural Wages Board is £3 10s. a week—that is, in the County Dublin.

The minimum?

Yes, and I am happy to relate that there are many farmers in my constituency who pay more. Unfortunately, I do not think that enlightened view extends very far outside the borders of County Dublin among the farmers, but it does extend to some limited extent in this county. Some farmers will admit, in my constituency at any rate, that they are able to and do pay more. I do not think anybody will argue that a farmer living and working in North County Dublin, which is the most productive agricultural area in the country, the richest area from the point of view of the production of vegetables, an area which is right beside the greatest market in the land, the City of Dublin, cannot pay at least £4 a week to the men he employs. It can be done, and it is being done in some cases, but it is not accepted as a general rule. I think the Minister should give a lead, not alone so far as County Dublin is concerned, but so far as the whole country is concerned. The day when £3 a week would be regarded as an adequate wage for the agricultural worker has gone.

It is the minimum.

The Minister appreciates, as I do, that while it is described as a minimum, nevertheless it acts as the maximum in most parts of the country. Farmers will be found to pay more, but they are the exception and are far from being the rule. I believe that if the Agricultural Wages Board had increased the minimum this year, farmers would have paid it or would be prepared to pay it now without any great protest. I think the present machinery for dealing with this question is outworn. Indeed, it does not operate as efficiently as it might.

I have been informed that the representative of the Government—I think it was the Minister for Industry and Commerce—when abroad recently at a conference discussing questions relating to wages, stated that the machinery which exists in this country for the regulation of relations as between farmer and worker is something which might be copied by other countries. Anybody who would make a statement of that kind cannot have much knowledge of the manner in which this machinery operates. The Agricultural Wages Board is composed at the top of four representatives of the employers and four representatives of the workers, with a number of people who are euphemistically described as neutral. It is rather a coincidence that the neutral people, when it comes to a question of voting, invariably cast their votes against the interests of the agricultural worker. The fact I want to bring to the Minister's notice is that something should be done by him now, when there is the prosperity which he announced when introducing his Estimate, to ensure that a portion at any rate of that prosperity will be passed on to the agricultural labourer.

It is only imaginary.

I do not think "it is only imaginary." I think that there is a good deal of it.

Not one farmer in ten thinks it is only imaginary.

I do not think it is just sufficient that Deputies should come to this House and advocate high prices for all kinds of agricultural produce and, at the same time, try to evade the question of the labourer and the worthiness to his hire. Deputy Corry is quite an old hand at that. He is an adept at trying to play off the desirability, or the need, for a fair wage for the agricultural worker with higher prices for all kinds of agricultural produce. I do not think that is fair at all. I think it is taking advantage of, and is exploiting, the agricultural workers of the country to come here and talk about the need there is for higher wages, and to say that these higher wages can only be paid if prices are increased. I think that, even with things as they are, wages could be very considerably increased for agricultural workers. They will not be increased unless some kind of a lead is given by the Minister. I suggest to him that he should give that lead.

I mentioned that it was difficult for anybody listening to the speeches of the Opposition Deputies to find out what is their exact line so far as agricultural policy is concerned. Certainly, the long effort of Deputy Smith last week was in no way helpful or illuminating as far as that is concerned. On the one hand, we have Fianna Fáil Deputies stating that the future of this country may be safely left to the Irish farmer, and that, no matter what happens, he will always do the right thing. If that is the case, why should there be compulsory tillage or why should not everything be left to the absolute free will of the tenant farmers? We had Deputy O'Grady complimenting the Minister on the land project. To-day, Deputy Gilbride said that project was wholly unsuitable for the West of Ireland. In view of these conflicting statements from Opposition Deputies, it is about time, I think, that there was some kind of an agreed line on Fianna Fáil policy, so that we shall know exactly what they are talking about. There is no doubt so far as the Minister's policy is concerned. He does not leave anyone in the dark, whether they agree with him or not.

The question of tomatoes has been raised on this Estimate. It is one that affects my constituency and one which I desire to refer to. I think this question of tomatoes has not been properly tackled or handled. The Minister, on various occasions, has referred to the fact that the tomato growers during the years of the emergency extracted very high prices for their produce from the people. We have had in very recent years a situation wherein tomato growers, far from getting high prices, were getting very low prices, prices which, from their point of view, were uneconomic. That kind of situation is undesirable at both ends, prices being too high, on the one hand, and then at other periods being too low, due to lack of adequate control of the market in so far as tomatoes are concerned.

I do not at all subscribe to the view that the price of tomatoes, which in this country are becoming part of the diet of the ordinary working people, should be left to the vagaries of supply and demand. I do not think it should be left to the fluctuations of the city market. There should be some regulation whereby, on the one hand, the producer of the tomatoes will be guaranteed a fair price, not an exorbitant price, and not a price that is going to rob the people, but a fair price, one which will leave him a reasonable profit, and to ensure on the other hand that these tomatoes will be sold to consumers at a price that they will be able to pay. In a situation such as that this native industry could be protected, and the commodity which the producers had to sell would not become a luxury or a rare and scarce one.

The Minister, I think, should consider the fixation of a price in the matter of tomatoes, at all price levels. If we are to continue as we are doing, to import Dutch tomatoes at periods when there is supposed to be a shortage of Irish tomatoes on the market, the market will become glutted with outside tomatoes. Prices will be jumping one day and falling the next day, and so unstable conditions will always exist. I think that is a bad situation. It certainly does not lead to any encouragement for a native industry of this kind. There are more tomatoes produced in my constituency than in any constituency in Ireland. North County Dublin is, I think, the main source of supply for the Dublin market. A considerable volume of employment is given, not of hired labour but to the members of families who work themselves on the production of this commodity. I would ask the Minister to consider that particular aspect of the question so as to ensure that we will not have a recurrence of a situation wherein either the producer on the one hand, or the consumer on the other, will be wrongly done by.

I hope that the Minister, when he is replying, will tell us what has happened to the Agricultural Workers (Holidays) Bill. Is it still in existence? It is a long time since we have heard of it. I had thought and had hoped that this Bill would be law by the present time. It has been looked forward to by agricultural workers up and down the country, but so far it has not materialised. The introduction of that Bill was, in my opinion, one of the most progressive steps taken by the Minister, and it is most unfortunate that we have not had the opportunity of passing it into law. I am sure that all Deputies, regardless of Party, would be very glad to ensure that it got a speedy passage through the Oireachtas.

References have been made during the course of this debate to the mechanisation of agriculture. Mechanisation, in the minds of some Deputies, would seem to have become associated with ranching. That, to my mind, is a totally erroneous view of it. In my constituency, particularly in the area around Rush, where there is more intensive cultivation perhaps than there is in any part of Europe, there is a great degree of mechanisation of the average farm despite the fact that the average farm there is very much smaller than the average farm in the West of Ireland. In area it would not be more than two to three acres. Despite the fact that it is so minute, the farmers, being progressive and hard-working men, have developed mechanisation to a considerable extent. One will find very few of them without a tractor and they are anxious to go even further in mechanising their work. I think it is a wrong conception of the problem to suggest, as Deputy Gilbride suggested this morning, that mechanisation must lead to large-scale ranching. We have had two extreme views on this matter, and there must be a happy medium somewhere.

A little over 100 years ago we had 8,000,000 people living on the land and, as we know, a great number of them were wiped out by a famine. Many people would seem to think that was a desirable situation but most of that 8,000,000 must have been living on very small plots. The standard of living must have been very low when one considers the kind of diet they had. I do not think we shall ever revert to that situation. I do not think it is desirable that we should. Some people seem to think that the number who can live on the land is unlimited. That is quite wrong. No matter how good agricultural policy may be or how effective it is we cannot have complete prosperity for the rural community without rural industries as well. Mechanisation must bring good results. It must reduce farmers' costs. With efficient development it must in the long run win more from the land because it must bring the land which is not now in production into production.

It must raise the individual's production with a proportionate increase in wages.

While criticism of mechanisation may be sincere it is certainly not well informed. I want to deal now with a matter with which the Minister is very familiar because I have discussed it with him on many occasions. I refer to the treatment of the workers at Johnstown Castle. It is not a good thing to have so much dissatisfaction on a State farm which should be a model farm from the point of view of employment and working conditions. Some kind of remedy must be found for the present situation and I appeal to the Minister again to reexamine the matter in an effort to see if some kind of accommodation cannot be found for the workers.

Finally, I sympathise with the Minister for all that he has endured over the past week and I trust that his gethsemane will come to a conclusion to-day. When replying I think he should indicate to the House whether or not he will give a lead to the country generally on this question of agricultural wages as he did a couple of years ago.

I have listened to a good part of this debate. My first impression is that the Minister will never secure the support of all the farmers for those aspects of his policy of which everyone can approve until he and his colleagues stop trying to pretend that the whole of the Fianna Fáil policy was disastrous, and stop trying to use figures for production in 1946 and 1947 as a basis for comparative propaganda, knowing full well that those two years were disastrous from the point of view of weather following upon a long period of war, during which there had been a shortage of fertilisers, machinery and other farming essentials. The Minister is fond of using the word "fraudulent." He will not blame me if I now hit back and say that the use of the 1946 and 1947 figures for production as a basis for comparative propaganda is completely and utterly fraudulent. It merely causes resentment amongst farmers, all of whom are looking for a lead, and most of whom would like to see an agricultural policy carried out here on a non-political basis. We shall never achieve a net increase in production of 25 per cent., 30 per cent. or 50 per cent. so long as the main aspects of our policy are the subject of bitter and acrimonious dispute. There should no longer be any need for that. There should be a keen and controversial debate on the administration of the Department, on the details of policy, on the way things are being done, on whether one aspect of production is being considered to too great a degree at the expense of another aspect. The fact is that we still have Deputies getting up here and talking as if the whole Fianna Fáil policy during the past 16 years was related to normal economic conditions.

We had Deputy Rooney yesterday offering a slavish loyalty and admiration to the Minister, a thing I certainly never gave to any Fianna Fáil Minister in my ten years. We had him going back to the time of the economic war, and using figures for the purpose of his argument, not one set of figures but two sets——

Is there any one of the 15 years with which a legitimate comparison may be made?

He, first of all, referred to 1946 and 1947, two disastrous years, and then he went back to the economic war and spoke of our first six years in office. He failed to mention the fact that the exports of all agricultural produce showed a decline in value from the beginning of the world depression and that that was a factor we had to face on coming into office. He did not mention the fact that the dairy industry in 1931 was virtually in a state of collapse. He did not mention the fact that Fianna Fáil policy for 15 years was not alone not related to normal conditions but to two completely abnormal states of affairs. We deliberately entered into the economic dispute with Great Britain knowing the responsibility attaching thereto, knowing the inevitable results if the British Government should impose upon us penalties in regard to the importation of our produce. We asked the people to support us during that period. As soon as the economic war was over we had one year's breathing space and after that we immediately entered upon a world war. Our policy, therefore, had to be aligned to war conditions. Fifty years hence historians will say that the miracle was we were able to maintain the volume of production roughly at the same level at which it was when we came into office and that we did not show rather a tremendous reduction having regard to these two conditions of affairs, the economic war and the world war. As I have said, the whole of this debate has been conducted in a sort of lurid atmosphere of pretence; if conditions had been normal during our period of office we would nevertheless have involved the country in the same sort of difficulties in which it was involved because, as I have said, agricultural policy at that time was directed partly by political considerations.

It is well to remember that Fianna Fáil policy was partly permanent in character and partly designed to overcome special difficulties. The permanent character of the policy was related to the preservation of the home market for farmers and the exclusion of foreign produce in so far as it could be done. It related to the provision of alternative employment for the agricultural community if they were unable to obtain employment on farms. It was related to the inauguration of new agricultural schemes, such as the land improvement scheme, the farm buildings scheme, and the offering of increased grants for practically every type of scheme carried out by agricultural committees. Then, of course, there were special considerations, such as the high rate of compulsory tillage during the war, special measures to ensure the maximum growing of home feeding stuffs, and so forth.

Deputy Rooney suggested in his speech that the recovery from the economic war came only at the end of the economic war. In fact, all the figures show that the recovery began about the end of 1935 and proceeded continuously from that time onwards. It is interesting to note the fact that we conducted this struggle and, as a result, we were able to ensure a stable Constitution, decided by the people of this country. Deputy Rooney, who is to be found amongst the new republicans, seems to be unable to grant us any credit for preparing the ground-work in regard to that matter. The actual fact was that we were lucky to preserve our total volume of production. We were lucky to leave the land in such a condition that when we had two successive years of good weather and more fertilisers there was an immediate rebound in the yield of crops.

The Minister, I believe, is a religious man and I do think that he should stop allowing the members of his Party to give him the entire credit for the crop yields of the two last years, when he should know that it lay very considerably in the hands of Divine Providence Who gave us marvellous weather, and it was also due to the fact that we were able to put in considerable quantities of fertilisers to renourish the land.

Surely the Deputy would consider that our continued existence from moment to moment is due to Divine Providence.

Yes, but if the Minister would read Deputy Rooney's speech he would see that Divine Providence is left completely out of the argument.

The simple faith presumes these things.

Members of the Government Party seem to give the Minister credit for all the schemes left him by the Fianna Fáil Government, such as the farm building grants scheme, the egg and poultry scheme, the farm improvements scheme as it then was, increased grants to committees of agriculture for practically every aspect of agriculture, the beginning of the soil survey, the beginnings of the arterial drainage scheme, the guaranteed price for wheat. I hope members will recall that these schemes were largely Fianna Fáil in origin. I understand that a considerable part of the veterinary scheme was in the course of preparation when the Government left office. It was put into operation by the present Minister, but it was being planned at that time.

I have never given exclusive credit to any Fianna Fáil Minister for Agriculture for anything good that came out of the Fianna Fáil policy. I never gave exclusive credit to any Minister for Agriculture because farmers during the war, in spite of their difficulties, were better off, on account of the increased prices. I never gave exclusive credit to Deputy Seán Lemass, then Minister for Industry and Commerce, who made it possible for industries to start here, or exclusive credit for building up every industry. We shall never get any unity on agricultural policy so long as that kind of fulsome admiration and praise takes place. The position at the moment is that conditions were never more suitable for a Minister for Agriculture to do well for this country and assist the farmers to do their own job. It is the first time in the whole history of the country that we have no abnormal political conditions in the Twenty-Six Counties. It has never happened before. First of all, we had the first world war, we then had the struggle for independence, then the civil war; we were then plunged into the world depression, then we had the economic war, then the second world war.

Then we had this Government, and peace.

There has never been a year since 1912 in which there were no unstable political conditions on the one hand and on the other hand in which, for once in history, the British Government were not able to write cheques in any currency they wished. They were in the position that they would no longer have to prohibit by tariff the import of Chinese glass that had to be decontaminated and purified by antiseptics when it arrived. They could no longer write cheques in any currency for all the foodstuffs they wished to purchase, produced at the lowest cost in some country under inferior labour conditions. They could buy only a limited quantity in the dollar market, and were down to a ration of meat of 1/3 a week and bound to pay high prices for our produce. It is up to the Minister for Agriculture to get the best long-term price he can. To give credit to the Minister for Agriculture for the enormous increase in the value of cattle exports is ridiculous under the circumstances. If any credit is to be given to him, it is if he is able to make a good bargain, having regard to conditions there are already present.

As I have said, fertilisers are now freely available. American money can be borrowed with reasonable freedom so that, while we find the British constrained to buy beef and mutton at high prices in this country, we for a limited period are able to borrow American money for land reclamation and other purposes. If the members of the Government Party were honest, they would go back to 1938-39 for their basic figure, the one year in which we had a breathing space, in which we completed a certain constitutional struggle upon which the Constitution of this country is now based, in which for a brief 12 months the adverse effects of the economic war were over. If those figures are taken, the fact is revealed immediately that we are only just back to the volume of agricultural production of that year, that the number of pigs has not yet reached the 1938-39 level, and so forth and so on. In actual fact, I would not blame the Minister if he took 1912 for his basic figure, for although we were under British occupation there had been a good many years of comparatively normal internal economic conditions then. I would not consider the Minister unreasonable if he went back to 1912 for his basic figure, as there was no normal period since that date until this year, and start going back to give a long list of statistics to go to prove that he is the perfect Minister for Agriculture.

That period is almost exactly coterminous with the Deputy's Leader's period in Irish public life.

I would like agriculture to be taken out of the political arena, with the exception of details in administration. It should be possible to do that, but it will never be possible so long as the Minister—having talked against wheat, peat and beet during the last two years of the last Government; in fact, during the whole period—tries to align his policy now in a manner to show how tremendously different it is from Fianna Fáil, whilst at the same time being compelled by circumstances to adopt a great deal of the policy we advocated. That is the position. The farmers know it and the farmers who supported the Government for 16 years who, in most cases preserved the same number of seats for the Government as in the general election before the last, will not follow any definite line of policy unless they can be assured that these prejudices are forgotten, that the Minister starts off on a new line and stops trying to show how different his policy is from Fianna Fáil and trying to pretend that all that happened during our régime was due, not to abnormal circumstances but to what he has always considered in his speeches to be a normal policy with normal results.

Dealing with the present agricultural position, we have the fact that over 50,000 persons have left the land in the last 18 months or so, equivalent to the number that left the land during the whole of the period of office of Fianna Fáil. That means that there is a larger income from a smaller number of people, but it is not what you might call developing agriculture intensively. It is not a good symptom, so far as the future of the country is concerned. Unless we have a more agreed agricultural policy, it is likely that that flight from the land will continue.

Would the Deputy refer me to the particular statistics from which he is quoting now?

The figures were given yesterday for the number of persons employed in agriculture in 1949 as compared with the previous year.

I am respectfully inquiring for the statistical source of the Deputy's information.

It was in answer to a Parliamentary Question. The Minister will find it.

I thank you. I am merely asking for the courtesy of the reference. I am not questioning the Deputy's accuracy, for a moment.

Dealing with particular aspects of production, we are aware that the cattle market has been expanded. It is good for the country that it should expand, so long as it is not at the expense of other forms of production and so long as it does not militate against our national security. I do think it right, however, to remind members of the Government that statements were made not long ago that they would try to hit the British in their pride, their pocket and their prestige, as a consequence of the recent Act carried through the British Parliament in relation to Northern Ireland. I think it well to remind the country also that the Minister for External Affairs, in reporting to the E.C.A. Commission on Europe, said that in fact we were running into debt to the United States, that our dollar debt was increasing, that we were saving the British Government millions of dollars by the export of greater numbers of cattle whereas, in fact, he reported, we should be growing more wheat. I wonder whether the extreme Republicans in the Government Party——

Would the Deputy give the quotation for that?

I wonder whether the extreme Republicans in the Government are satisfied with these two statements and their consistency?

Perhaps the Deputy would give the quotation.

I have not got the quotation but the report was so burned into my memory that I could hardly forget it. It was said only once and it has not been repeated. I should add, in that connection, that I quite appreciate that, having regard to the European character of the reconstruction efforts that are now being made, with the help of American loans and grants, if we had been in office, in consultation with all the other member States, we might have had to agree to a form of agricultural production for a period which might have the practical effect of involving us in great dollar commitments and in saving the British Government dollars but, if we had, we would do it with our eyes open and we would not say at the same time that we intended to hit the British in their pride, their pocket and their prestige.

I do not need even to refer to the statements of the Minister for External Affairs. I can ask the Minister whether in any of his policy, he is carrying out the suggestion made at the time of the general discussion on the Partition question that we would hit the British in their pride, their pocket and their prestige. He might indicate whether he is taking part in that campaign and in that policy which must be approved by the extreme Republicans, so-called, in the Government Parties.

To what category does beef belong—pride, pocket or prestige?

The Minister has referred to the slaughter of calves. Of course it is a good thing the slaughter of calves stopped but members of the Government tend to talk about the number of calves slaughtered as if it ran into millions. The actual fact is that in the last three years of office of the previous Government, even when times were totally abnormal, the number of calves slaughtered every year was 56,000 and there were round about 850,000 cattle, all under one year, in the country at the same time, showing that the slaughter of calves, although numerically of some importance, could hardly be regarded as a national disaster.

Would the Deputy look at the number of two-year-old cattle?

There were only 56,000 slaughtered out of a total of 850,000 young cattle and these three years were, as I have said, totally abnormal from every aspect. Taking the question of pigs and bacon, I think at the moment it can be said quite fairly that many farmers are not contented with the price of pigs and that the consumer is gravely discontented with the price of bacon. I should like to ask the Minister how far he has got with his promise to reduce the price of bacon within 48 hours.

10/- a cwt. and another 10/- I hope next Monday.

So far as I know, in one town in Ireland, at any rate, the price of bacon has gone up.

The curers brought it down by 10/- a cwt. and any grocer who has not taken down the price of bacon proportionately is a rogue.

Consumers will be glad to hear it, because, having been promised a reduction in the cost of living, and having seen the cost of living rise in regard to a number of commodities in the last few weeks—an increase of 2 per cent. in the official figure and a real increase of much more—any little effort on the part of the Minister to bring down the cost of living will be greatly appreciated by those who expected that the promises in regard to reduction in the cost of living would be honoured. In fact, no promise is being honoured whatever. In regard to the question of the pig industry, I hope the Minister will be able to find a proper solution to the problem of exporting bacon to Great Britain without having to charge the taxpayers with a subsidy. It should be possible for him to do so. At the end of the economic war there was a total of 930,000 pigs of all kinds in the country. After six years of the economic war and economic war strain, in 1949 there were 647,000 pigs in the country. If, after six years of economic war we could have nearly 1,000,000 pigs in the country, I hope the Minister will be able to find a solution whereby we can export our bacon profitably.

Does the Deputy not recognise that the export of bacon was subsidised while his Government was in office?

I recognise that, because there was an economic dispute arising out of constitutional matters, and the Minister was at the time entirely opposed to the views of the Government of the day. Getting down to the question of cereals, I notice that the total production in tons of wheat, oats and barley was 1,054,000 in 1947 and 1,079,000 in 1949. A higher yield came from a lower acreage. I notice that the tilled area in the country under those two crops declined in the same period from 1,550,000 acres to 1,200,000-odd acres. There is no need for me to repeat again all that has been said about the mishandling in the marketing of those crops and the misunderstandings, as far as the Minister for Agriculture is concerned. He cannot evade the issue by accusing Fianna Fáil of using propaganda to reduce the price of cereals on the market.

The fact remains that the Minister started out with a gross prejudice against the growing of wheat, and that he revealed it in every speech he made during his first year of office. Gradually he had to amend his view, but at the same time he never gave the country a clear lead with regard to the growing of wheat, but the farmers have discovered that wheat is the only cash crop on which they can rely, and if there is an increase in the wheat yield it is because they now know that Fianna Fáil were right after all with regard to the value of wheat as a cash crop. We have been told that the yield from 30,000 acres would give us bread for some 18 or 20 days, and to that extent it is a valuable contribution rather than borrowing money from the American Government. But if the Minister forgets all that he has said about wheat in past days he might find it possible to have a more stable tillage policy. Prices have rocketed up and down too violently, and we need stability with regard to those two crops, a stable policy and an understanding with the Government.

February 8th, 1950.

The total tillage area was 16 per cent. in 1949. The Minister had a report from Mr. Holmes, the New Zealand grass expert, who took the view that many of us hold that it is good to have tillage because it produces better grass and better grass produces better tillage.

One more cow, one more sow, one more acre under the plough.

In his report he said that there were 7,500,000 acres of grass lands that needed cultivation in this country. If we continue with a total tillage acreage, including all root, green and cereal crops, of 16 per cent., we shall never come near more than a quarter of the area in the suggestion he made when he said that almost 7,500,000 acres of grass land needed ploughing up, and we shall never increase our tillage acreage until the farmers know where they are with regard to tillage matters.

My own belief is that the Minister will have to go even further than we went with regard to tillage. Now that conditions are favourable in the world markets, it is not beyond him to devise a method whereby a considerable amount of every crop can be guaranteed and with present supplies of feeding stuffs to estimate in advance what the farmer can grow. Most elaborate estimates of that kind are made in Great Britain, and God forbid that we should ever have the rationing of feeding stuffs which is the British farmers' unhappy lot. It would be possible to increase the maximum of wheat, oats and potatoes and to foretell to the farmers reasonably how much they can safely grow and necessarily stock a small surplus. Again, he would have to avoid the entirely excessive activities of Mr. Brannan in America——

The Deputy saw the story of Mr. Brannan on my desk. I shall read it.

——who produced acres and acres of potatoes several yards deep. He will have to avoid that difficulty. I am speaking without any political prejudice at all.

It is not beyond possibility. It may not be easy and it will require long consideration to have a system whereby, although farmers may sell oats to each other and although there may be crossselling, it would be possible to guarantee all those crops for a period. The Minister will at least admit that it is within the bounds of possibility. I know that there are difficulties attached, but he will agree that it is not entirely chimerical.

Provided that the Deputy and I have the services of Michael the Archangel with Raphael the Archangel as his assistant.

The Minister might have to invoke some unusual forces but, nevertheless, I am putting it up. It is quite interesting and he will agree that it is worth discussing.

It would be gratifying to have an archangel sitting beside me in the Dáil, but I cannot see it in the realm of probable developments.

I should like to get back to the production of eggs. I find that many of my constituents have complained about the Minister's policy with regard to eggs. They were not warned sufficiently that they would have to provide their own feeding stuffs. The price is not satisfactory and there is a reduction in price for certain periods during the year.

Nine months.

There is uncertainty for the future with regard to egg production. If the Minister wants to maintain and increase that valuable form of production he should give more information to the House as to what future prospects really are and with regard to what form of feeding stuffs is likely to be available in the future. He should tell us if he is always going to wait to buy maize until the market seems to him most propitious with the result that certain farmers find themselves without feeding stuffs. The Minister's policy of growing all the feeding stuffs for poultry on the farm is an excellent one but it is a difficult one, as many farmers have long accepted that they must buy feeding stuffs. As Deputies from the West have already said, the poultry business in the West is not a business for which farmers in our time even before the world war had sufficient feeding stuffs on the farm. They normally bought feeding stuffs of one kind or another. There should be some stability and certainty. The Minister knows the view which farmers of every political viewpoint retain about feeding stuffs. He knows the problem by heart already.

The question of the provision of imported feeding stuffs affects the whole of the market. We were informed by the Minister for Finance that we had a total of 29,000,000 dollar exports of one kind or another, and that wheat, maize, petrol and tobacco would account for 47,000,000 dollars. That is a huge deficit, and it is entirely wrong that we should go on borrowing money from the American Government to pay for our daily bread. We should like to hear from the Minister more about sterling wheat. We would like him to tell us what proportion of our total imports of wheat and maize he anticipates will come normally from sterling sources. Has he any idea for the future with regard to that? For how long will we be compelled to borrow money from America for essential materials of life and essential feeding stuffs, and how long will it be before we reach the position where we shall only have to borrow for capital goods, machinery and such like commodities?

The Deputy knows that is not honest.

The Minister accuses me of being dishonest. I am merely giving the figures which were given by the Minister for Finance in his Budget statement.

The Deputy knows perfectly well that the Counterpart Fund exists for every dollar.

For a considerable portion of our wheat, maize, petrol and tobacco we are forced to borrow, temporarily anyhow. Nobody wants to commit the country to a debt which it will have to repay for the consumption of essential commodities.

The Counterpart Fund is accumulating daily.

I am well aware of how the Counterpart Fund is used, but it still means a liability which will have to be repaid in dollars to the extent that we borrow and are not made a free grant. The free grant which we receive is small, while we are allowed to borrow all we want. We know that we shall have to pay that back.

And we have the Counterpart Fund.

We shall have to pay it back in some way unless we are remitted the debt.

In sterling. If you do not like that——

I should like to have the Minister's admission that, if he really believes that it is possible to increase the output of agriculture per acre by various schemes of improvement, it should be possible for us to grow a greater quantity of wheat without interfering with the general livestock production programme. The Minister cannot have it both ways. If he claims that agricultural output per acre would increase by 25 to 50 per cent., there should be ample acreage available in these circumstances for growing more wheat and for making ourselves less dependent on imports of wheat and maintaining the national security. I should like to have his admission at long last that we can anticipate a very great increase in the acreage of wheat without altering or interfering with the production of live stock—pigs, sheep, cattle or anything else.

I should like also to hear the Minister make a confession about the growing of wheat. I think that practically every Minister of the previous Government made a confession at one time or another on different aspects of policy and admitted that he had been wrong, that perhaps he had overstated the case. Certainly the former Taoiseach was capable of doing that, as were other Ministers. Maybe the moment has arrived when the Minister for Agriculture ought to make a reasonable confession to the country in regard to the growing of wheat, the statement he made in 1947 that he would not be seen dead in a field of wheat and that the growing of wheat was a rotten fraud, designed to fill the pockets of profiteering millers. I think it is time he was big enough to make a statement of that kind to the House.

I desire to confirm every syllable I spoke on that occasion, formally and for the record.

In that case, why is it that the Minister for Industry and Commerce and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry and Commerce have recently been going around the country asking people to grow more wheat? Isolated advertisements have appeared, issued by the Minister, encouraging the growing of wheat, sandwiched in between appeals to grow barley, oats and potatoes. Why, in that case, does the Minister allow a certain amount of propaganda to be carried on for the growing of wheat if he still believes it is a rotten fraud?

This is a free country, and anyone can grow what he likes on his own land.

The Minister was not referring to the compulsory growing of wheat, but to the general growing of wheat, and he went on to say, after that, that he hoped that, after wheat and peat, beet would go up the spout. He said that in 1947. He suggested that the sooner beet production ended the better for the country, and we are still importing sugar when we should be producing beet to cover the whole sugar requirements of the country. I should like to ask the Minister to make a statement to the country about his present views in regard to the growing of sugar beet and whether he hopes it will go up the spout, as he hoped peat and wheat would.

Peat has pretty well gone, has it not?

Next I come to the question of milk and butter. The question of dairying is one of very great importance, because, as the Minister has observed, the greatest level of continuous employment is given in the dairying area. All that we have been told is that there is going to be difficulty about exporting butter, and the suggestion has been made that the price of milk should be reduced over a long-term period. I do not believe the Minister has ever yet faced the realities about dairying. During our time conditions were abnormal and it was impossible to make any final long-term decision, but it is quite obvious that, if we are not to depend entirely on cattle exports in the matter of our foreign trade, we should do something to stimulate the export of butter without taxing our people in order to do so.

I believe that the Minister for Agriculture of the day will have to do something more about increasing milk yields and about breeding. I do not believe that the Minister has done anything final or decisive in regard to that matter. I know farmers in the dairying area who have improved their grass lands, who have managed to increase enormously the amount of nourishment they can get out of an acre of grass by modern farming methods. I know farmers in the dairying area who are able to make far greater profit than other farmers. My own belief is that some temporary step will have to be taken to preserve the dairying industry and there will have to be a long-term improvement programme, so that it will be possible for the average dairy farmer to produce a great deal more milk per acre on his land.

There is no easy or quick way out of the difficulty. It is impossible to make a change, any noticeable change, in a period of five years; it must be a long-term policy. I admit—this is my own personal view—that if we produce the maximum amount of feeding stuffs for the country and if we are not running into debt for the purpose of buying wheat and if we have a full programme of tillage designed to safeguard our national security, I have not got the same objection as some Deputies have to continuing the subsidies for butter exports if, at the same time, a long-term programme of improvement of pasture and of improving the yield of milk is put into operation. I believe it can be done and I believe that it is easier to do it now when conditions are favourable than it was at any time during our period of office. I do not see why we should tax our people to export butter to Great Britain, if what the Minister for External Affairs says is true, that we are running into debt to the American Government and saving the English Government millions of dollars. If we can get out of that position, so that at least we are feeding ourselves and not unduly assisting other countries at our expense, I see no reason why we should not recommend a continuance of the subsidy while we are waiting for milk yields to improve, and for the total amount of feeding stuffs available in the dairying area to improve, through drainage, reclamation and more modern methods.

Dealing with some of the fundamental problems attending agricultural production, I think the Minister makes the mistake of talking too dramatically to the people. The farmers have been through so many difficulties since the beginning of this century that they are not very easily going to make a change in their methods. I do not believe it is effective to make dramatic speeches calling on farmers to abolish horse ploughs, to use a different type of plough and to make all sorts of changes in their economy. I think it merely disturbs the minds of a great many exceedingly conservative farmers who have suffered too many changes in marketing policy to be willing to make quick changes in their methods. The fact that some 50,000 people left the land last year indicates that, with all the inducements given to them by the Minister in the way of the land reclamation scheme and the land rehabilitation scheme, they apparently prefer to leave more land in the hands of fewer people. That was their way of achieving a better way of life.

It is going to be awfully difficult to change that principle. So long as only one person can inherit a farm, so long as farms are not divided—and they never will be in this country—and so long as emigration to the towns or to England is easy, it will be a long time before farmers can be persuaded to invest working capital in their farms with a view to securing what, in their lifetime, would be only a very modest increase in output. We need to have a very long-term quiet programme of activity. There is no good in trying to bull-doze the farmer into making radical changes in a few months. What is needed is a long-term programme, and I think that until the Minister clarifies his policy a great deal he will not get the full co-operation that he should have from the farmers so that they can take advantage of the conditions that are now so favourable. My own belief is that all the boasting that is being done about prices for cattle and for this, that or the other thing, whether it comes from the former Government or the present Government, is probably in the long run very ill-advised.

Unless there is a world war we are going to face very stiff competition in the next ten years, and ultimately price comparisons are going to be of far less importance. In all countries throughout the world vast reclamation schemes are being undertaken. Methods of production are being improved. There have been some improvements here, but the system of offering farmers price inducements without giving them warning of what may happen, unless there is a world war, is false policy. As I have stated it is going to be very hard to persuade farmers that the price they get for cattle, pigs and eggs will not be as important as a greater production of these things per acre of land. Already we notice that the British Government are making comparisons between Danish and Irish prices to our disadvantage. Denmark is a country where the whole problem is simpler than it is here, because the land of that country is of the same kind almost throughout the country. Again the Danish people have had their land settlement problem over since the beginning of the 19th century, and they have developed a system suitable to themselves and to meet their markets. It is going to be hard for us to compete with the Danes because our situation and circumstances are entirely different. As I have stated I do not believe there is any advantage in engaging in a long term programme of importance unless there is a policy instituted by the Government, and more or less agreed on by both of the principal political Parties in this House. Fulminating against Fianna Fáil is not the way to get the farmers to co-operate. There are many farmers who are as good as any others, and who supported Fianna Fáil over a number of years, and we lost very few seats in the past 16 years through them.

On the question of land rehabilitation it is in my view essential to use machinery in certain circumstances for land rehabilitation, and I would like to repeat here, what has been stated before, that we have not tried to sabotage that scheme. I am well aware that there are from 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 acres of land in this country that need drastic improvement and drainage, and if we are able to make use of the American Counterpart Fund for drainage I believe every farmer in the country should apply under that scheme and should take advantage of any services which might be useful to him.

I feel that in a good many cases the farmers find that these schemes are not suitable to their lands, and I think in such cases they should get the committee of agriculture to look into these matters and the committee, in turn, should inform the Minister as to the suitability or otherwise of the schemes in these cases. If anybody has a complaint to make against the scheme they should band themselves together and get the correct information and criticise the scheme from the constructive point of view.

I would also like to ask the Minister whether it is intended to go in for hillside reclamation. That is being done in Great Britain and in parts of Wales, where the land is similar to our own. There are many areas here where you have a substratum rock and reclamation could not be successfully carried on, but there are other areas where the soil is free from rock and stone and where hillside reclamation could be carried out. So far as I know, that has been done with great success in Great Britain under the direction of Sir George Stapleton, and also with success in parts of Wales, where the conditions are similar to those of this country. There has been some talk of such schemes being carried out here, but I would like to hear more about it from the Minister. I doubt very much if it could be carried out here on an individual basis, but rather would it have to be done on a basis of some sort of employment scheme in most areas. There is no question about it that feeding stuffs suitable for store cattle could be increased by the improvement of land of that type and in certain cases crops such as rye could be sown on them. I would like to have the Minister's views on that matter.

So far as the general use of machinery is concerned it is obvious that machinery on the farm has come to stay and more and more farmers will use it. It is on the other hand quite obvious that the farmers will have to have horses for certain purposes. I do not think the Minister will dispute that the tractor is increasing in use and I think he should consult with his colleague the Minister for Defence in having some storage provided for fuel oil so that they could store up at least sufficient supplies for about one year's use. The position in this country at the moment is that we have no stock pile. We are the only country with a buoyant economy and no stock pile of any single commodity, whether it be food, machinery or oil for machinery. We should be able to create such stock piles and provide for the future and any emergency that might arise. It is ludicrous to suggest that we should go over to tractors until such times as we have created a stock pile of suitable oils.

It is hard to listen to a speech from the Deputy who has just sat down and who has no experience of gaining a livelihood from the land. Deputy Childers has tried to give us an agricultural policy and to listen to him bolstering up the Fianna Fáil policy yet was amusing. I wonder if Deputies are aware that Lord Oranmore and Browne in 1944 and 1945 allowed large quantities of wheat to rot just because he had grown the wheat on his estate as a food for snipe and other game birds for the amusement of the people who would visit his estate. Those are the types of people with whom Deputy Childers associates when he leaves his own constituency.

One would think that compulsory tillage and a tillage policy generally was something which Fianna Fáil had in mind for all time. We know perfectly well that there was not a word of compulsory tillage until it became absolutely necessary to produce wheat and the other essential commodities for our daily food.

We know perfectly well that if Fianna Fáil had remained in office for one more year, compulsory tillage would have been abolished because the rancher element in the country, who have such loyal and devoted friends in the Fianna Fáil Party, dislike to see their fields uprooted. They hate the sight of the virgin earth upturned. They prefer green fields and herds of cattle and droves of bullocks. It entails less employment and there is less need to worry about the much despised agricultural worker or his wages. Therefore, even though Fianna Fáil might have the idea, or might pretend to have the idea, of continuing compulsory tillage, the big cheque books of their aristocratic rancher friends would force their hands and compulsory tillage would not be continued.

On a point of order, is it permissible to make a charge against a person who is not able to reply in this House or may I make a statement in regard to what the Deputy has just said?

It is quite permissible.

I would ask the Deputy to confine himself to the Estimate before the House.

I will not have the gentleman who was named so grossly libelled by a Deputy of this House.

That is not libel.

What about Colonel Bellingham—another rancher?

I will not allow the Deputy to challenge the evidence of my own eye-sight.

The Deputy will not get away with it.

You will admit that the Right Hon. Lord Oranmore and Browne is your friend?

Lord Oranmore and Browne employed 70 to 100 people on his estate of 6,000 acres, in 1944. I remember I assisted with the harvest.

Some assistance in any harvest-field.

It is sheer libel.

The Minister, in introducing his Estimate, made it quite clear that facts speak for themselves. The increased production of eggs, butter, bacon, cattle and all the other agricultural products we have for export is in itself definite proof that the agricultural policy of this Government is putting agriculture forward. No farmer will produce unless it is made a good paying proposition for him to produce. The industrialist will not start an industry or produce an article unless it is a paying proposition. There is an old-established tradition in agriculture that farmers will not engage in a particular type of production unless it brings a handsome profit and pays them for their labour. The profit they derive from hard work will benefit the nation as a whole. Increased production is proof of the fact that the agricultural industry is prospering as it has not prospered for many years.

I shall not throw the bouquets entirely at the present Minister for Agriculture because the world, for a number of years past, has been hungry and the fact of the world war would tend to increase the value of foodstuffs. However, we must appreciate that the Minister and his colleagues are making a very fine effort to make the most of this boom in agriculture. We may listen to the multitude of excuses that will be given as to why agriculture was not more prosperous in past years, but I still maintain, as an agriculturist, that agriculture over a long number of years received very little encouragement. There was no such thing as an effort being made to guarantee markets or to guarantee or to secure firm prices.

Unfortunately for the Minister and the agricultural community as a whole, sometimes an effort is made to get prices which cannot possibly be got, but if a Minister does his best, as this Minister is doing, with regard to guaranteed markets and prices, even if he were a Fianna Fáil Minister, and even if I were in opposition, I would certainly never blame him for doing the very best he could and yet failing to satisfy the agricultural community as a whole. The increase in the many branches of agriculture are proof that the farming community and the agricultural industry are prosperous at the present time.

Perhaps the Minister, having lived most of his life west of the Shannon, believes in the policy of mixed farming and may be inclined to devote most of his attention to that policy which tries to encourage the middle-class farmer to put in more tillage, to produce on his own land all that is necessary to feed his live stock and, as he told us time and again, to walk it off the land to a ready market, which is available at the present time. That is the type of industry that has been carried on in the small farms west of the Shannon for the past 150 years. That is the type of industry which, I daresay, will be carried on as long as farming is carried on in that area. You cannot break tradition. If the Minister thinks that that is the best system of agriculture for this country, while it may not be to the liking of people who are dairy producers or grazing farmers or ranchers, in the Midlands, as far as farmers west of the Shannon are concerned, we must admit that we have experienced, as a result of his efforts, a boom of prosperity which we have been long awaiting and we have a feeling of security that, if there is another world depression, in which the present prices may not be able to be maintained, we will have, for at least a year or so in advance, some idea of the way in which our economy must be balanced on our small farms so as to be able to meet the crash which, I suppose, will come some time or other.

When the world decides that it is fit to feed itself again, we, who must always rely on our next door neighbour, England, for a market, will find that they will try, as they are trying at the moment, to get food at cheaper prices. They will try to reduce our prices. It is the real test of any Minister for Agriculture or any Government, if they have the confidence of the agricultural community. The best way to have the confidence of the agricultural community is to drum into the minds of the people of this country the fact that the middle class farmer is the back-bone of any country. If one line of production crashes on him during a certain year, he can turn his hand, without having to alter his whole agricultural outlook, to something else, and thereby fit himself to take the rebound of economic depression. The Minister for Agriculture is trying to do that. If he continues on his present line we, west of the Shannon, can only give him every encouragement and help.

I admit the failure with regard to the price of eggs. The Minister assured us that 2/6 a dozen would be available for eggs, and that the more eggs available for export the better the price would be for them. Candidly, from the outset, I never believed anything of the kind. If you produce an article or a commodity to the extent that it causes an over-flooding of the market for it, you will find that there will be a reduction in its price. The Minister has caused a certain amount of disappointment to the poultry producers, even though he has made an arrangement that during the winter season there will be an increased price for eggs while, in the laying months, when it is less costly to produce them, there will be a decrease in the price. The poultry producers must, therefore, try and balance their production of eggs, and if possible ensure that they will have more eggs to sell during the months when the price will be high, as the Minister has advised them to do, and less eggs for sale when the price is low. I do not think, at the same time, that there was any great necessity to give farmers advice of that kind.

Farmers have a hard battle to fight, and they must be shrewd if they are to survive. A bad season or the loss of live stock could ruin a farmer in less than six months. There is no insurance and nothing that he can call upon. If he loses his health and has to go out of the management of his farm he has nothing to call to his assistance. There is no system of paying him a salary or anything of that kind to keep him going. He cannot afford to permit of any waste or overlapping. He knows that if he does it will not be long until he experiences the ill-effects of it. The people know well what to do. However, it is no harm to have a good honest-to-God practical talk delivered by the Minister for Agriculture: "Well, it is your own funeral. This is a free country. Do this and you will get more money. Do not do this and you will get less money."

I regret that the Minister is not now in the House to hear what I have to say in regard to the letting of land on the 11 months' grazing system. Every farmer, and particularly the small farmer, realises what a crime it is to let land on that system. The position at the moment is that if it is only a matter of ten acres of land in a congested area which are to be let on the 11 months' grazing system it is not the poor farmer who is in a position to rent that land but the man with money in his pocket. You have the chain rancher. You have the man with ten acres in one end of a congested village and maybe five acres in another village and so on, who can outbid any small farmer who is endeavouring to secure for himself a share in the benefits which are to be had now from land—for instance, the live-stock boom, such as it is. The Minister mentioned the letting of land on that system on the 7th May, 1949, to the Meath Committee of Agriculture. He pointed out that if people were content to let their land on the 11 months' grazing system he was not going to stand over it or allow it. He described them as miners of the land and said that if they were not willing to work their own land there were plenty of people who would be only too willing to work and till it and produce from it. He later mentioned the same matter in this House on the 27th April, 1950, as reported in column 1370 of the Official Report, Volume 120:—

"...we recognise that the duties of the landholder are of a solemn kind, and that, without any qualification of the right to own land, we declare that a man may do with his land anything except rent it, but that if a man acquires wide acres and then proceeds to derive an income from it by setting it to those who work it, the State will step in and purchase the land from the landholder and transfer its ownership to those who are working it."

There again, a year later he reechoed the statement he made to the Meath Committee of Agriculture. When introducing this Estimate the Minister stated—column 1791, Volume 121 of the Official Report:—

"I have constantly maintained that that system of agriculture has the additional advantage that it employs more of our people on the land;..."

That, I may say, is the system of agriculture which he described as "one more cow, one more sow and one more acre under the plough".

"...that that system of agriculture tends to multiply on our land farmer proprietors; that that is what this Government wants to see—not quasilandlords or 11-month tenants, but people owning and working their own land."

If I find myself in disagreement with the Minister on anything it is that over the past two years nothing on God's earth has been done about this 11 months' grazing system.

Hear, hear!

We have a Minister for Agriculture who is aware, as he must be aware because of the area in which he has spent all his life, of the conditions and who has mentioned to a committee of agriculture and twice in this House that land let on the 11 months' grazing system is nothing but robbery as far as the State is concerned and plundering as far as depriving the people who would work these lands themselves is concerned. Yet he sat down with his colleagues in the Government and has not put a stop to the system nor has he taken any step in that respect. If I criticise any part of the Minister's policy I criticise him on that point more than on anything else. However, if the 11 months' system of letting is allowed to go on much longer and if some notice is not taken of it by some responsible Department— either the Department of Agriculture or the Department of Lands, which is so very closely allied to it—my criticism and the criticism of other Deputies on the back benches will very soon make them take plenty of notice. I realise that we cannot do everything at once. We cannot give the people everything they ask for immediately. However, nothing like sufficient attention is being given to the problem of the 11 months' letting system which was first referred to by the Minister himself some time ago.

There is another thing that I would like to mention and that is with regard to the land rehabilitation scheme. In County Mayo we were the very lucky ones, if you like, because we happened to be the first county in which this land rehabilitation scheme went into operation. During the time it has been in operation, the amount of work done there has been very satisfactory and successful. There is no doubt that wherever the scheme has been completed it has definitely been a very good job.

I am faced with the constant problem of a very large number of small and middle-class farmers who are anxious to do this work by their own labour but who cannot obtain permission from the Department to go ahead with the work. I have known many cases where people on small holdings must do their own planning. They plan economically as regards the amount of work they can do. They make plans to rehabilitate one, two or three acres in such an area and then they apply to the Department to get permission to go ahead. They have their own family labour to rely on and they are ready to go ahead with the scheme, but then they find that the whole thing must be allowed to collapse because they do not get the Department's permission.

That is unfair. On a small farm, where people are anxious to carry out rehabilitation, to bring into fertility an acre or two, they should receive every assistance from the Department. To these people the one or two acres would be as valuable as 20, 30 or 40 acres on the larger farms. If the Minister were to increase the staff on this land rehabilitation project so far as the congested counties are concerned, and, when an application is sent to the office, to try to get the place inspected in time to allow the applicant to go ahead according to plan, he would be doing a very wise and useful thing.

Every year that slips by means a loss to the small farmer. He is not permitted, when he is anxious to rehabilitate his few acres, to improve his land. Every year that goes by means the loss of an acre that could, with rehabilitation, produce two or three times, and in some cases ten times, as much. If portions of those small holdings cannot be rehabilitated for three or four years, the small farmers will lose accordingly.

Now that we are on the move in agriculture we should ride the high tide as much as possible, and something should be done to facilitate those people to whom I referred. The Minister gave me a very genuine excuse, the excuse that he wishes to see as much as possible of the money spent on the land of Ireland, and as little as possible spent on the officials concerned with the administration of this scheme. There I am in full agreement with him, but a special concession should be made in the case of applicants for small plots, the applicants who want to improve one or two or three acres. That area may seem very small so far as land rehabilitation is concerned, but it means a good deal to the man with only ten or 15 acres. Something should be done immediately to meet those people. Anything that is done will be repaid one hundredfold. The Minister is capable of evolving some scheme to do what I suggest, to meet those people in the demands they are justly entitled to make.

I speak for a western county, like Deputy Gilbride of the Fianna Fáil Party, who has just spoken. We do not talk of the dairying industry or of the huge ranches or big farms. We talk of the policy relating to store cattle, the production of forward stores and pigs. The pigs are in small numbers on individual farms, but over a parish they multiply very considerably. The production of poultry is on the same scale. In the constituency I represent production is confined to the area of land on which each farmer can work, and where we have so many small farmers production is somewhat limited. Farmers try to get the most out of every animal and out of every article of agricultural produce that they have to sell.

When we speak about our different little industries, we have amongst them the production of forward store cattle. That is one of our valuable assets; it is a very valuable sideline. The small farmer who can produce four, five or six forward stores in the year cannot do it unless he grows his own foodstuffs. He cannot do much in the summer. The policy is to do as much tillage as possible, and then treat the cattle as stall-feds in the winter months or treat them in the open yard and have them ready to sell in the spring. Their rations must be supplemented by what is got from imported sources, such as maize and other imported animal feeding stuffs.

The home-produced feeding stuffs are a very important factor. I am in full agreement with the Minister in this, that he is a foolish farmer who will buy maize when he can produce something on the land to feed live stock which is just as good or almost as good as what he would buy across the shop counter. The war taught people a lesson that no Minister or Government could teach them. We had no maize or other feeding stuffs from abroad and we had to rely on what was grown at home. Still, the country kept going. The farmers west of the Shannon kept up the production of store cattle and poultry and the other little sidelines they had out of what they produced on their holdings.

So far as farms are concerned, we are faced with this situation. We have 60,624 farms of one acre and under. Those with one acre and under could not properly be described as farmers. I dare say they would come into the category of agricultural labourers or county council workers who have houses built for them and are given one acre plots. We have 20,003 farms of one to five acres. It is doubtful if they could be described as farmers. In the constituency that I come from, there is a good number, particularly in the eastern and western sections, of people who derive a livelihood in other ways than directly from the farm. The farm is only an address they call back to because they are mostly migratory labourers who travel to England for a livelihood—that is their means of existence.

We have 32,029 persons with ten to 15 acres. Those are the people who perhaps should get a definite type of attention. They are the people who struggle on the land and who make a meagre existence out of it, but they are determined that it will be cultivated, worked to the last perch and every single ounce of produce that can be got out of it will be got out of it. We have 89,311 people with 15 to 30-acre farms and 62,786 people with 30 to 50-acre farms. The over 30-acre farmer is all right; he has a fair amount of ground to manoeuvre on. With his family labour, he can find profitable employment on the farm.

The people who have from ten acres to 30 acres are the most valuable that there can be among the farming community because they are anxious to produce so much from their farms. They have not all the ground they would like to till and produce from and, therefore, they find themselves in the class known as nobody's children, nobody's babies. They are the people for whom I speak chiefly. When an individual finds in almost 90 per cent. of his constituency a certain type of farmer, he must naturally be most interested in that particular type.

We have again the slow-moving activities of the Land Commission in regard to middle-class or small farmers. These activities are proceeding at such a pace that I doubt if even the seventh generation of the one that is living at present will see a settlement reached of the problems which concern that type of smallholders. In the meantime, they have to exist and produce as best they can on their little holdings. It may be argued that the man with 200 or 300 acres of land, by using mass production methods for the production of pigs, poultry and cattle and who employs a good deal of labour, may be more valuable to the country than the small man. I venture to suggest that if you were to take a parish in the Midlands and a parish in County Mayo, both of equal size, and if a check were made on the cattle, poultry and pigs produced in each of these parishes, it would be found in nine cases out of ten that the thickly populated and congested parish in the West of Ireland was beating the one in the Midlands all ends up, that it was producing more for export and for the general good of the people at home.

The Minister for Agriculture, as he has told us, is very interested in the mechanisation of farming. Farming, as I have said, is a trade. The farmer has a good many problems to contend against. One is the weather. There is a good deal of drudgery and hard work attached to farming as we have known it over a long period of years. The farmer, with a few acres of hay to cut and save had, under the old system, to go out with his fork and his rake and try to get the hay into ship-shape. That meant a good deal of hard work.

The same applied to the production of potatoes. There was a good deal of drudgery, as many of our people learned when they had to go and work in Great Britain, involved in the digging of potatoes. Men might be employed on that work day after day and week after week, their backs bent digging out the potatoes. That was drudgery of the most horrible kind. It was work of that kind that was responsible more than anything else for the flight from the land. The young people of to-day do not want that type of work. We are moving to-day in a speedier and a faster age. We are producing more and, under modern conditions, there is less slavery, less of that tough, hard manual labour which was associated with work on the land in the past. The introduction of the mechanisation of farming is going to do away with a lot of that drudgery. The horse is not going to be completely exterminated, because both on the large farm as well as on the small farm there is still certain work which the horse will have to be employed to do.

We all know that the man with the tractor plough can now do almost ten times the amount of work that he could do with a team of horses, and that when he comes off the tractor in the evening he is almost as fresh himself as when he started out in the morning. The man who has a tractor has two advantages over the man who has not one. In the first place, it enables him to do more work and, secondly, it leaves him a fresher man, so that he is enabled to devote more time to other aspects of his farm work, such as fencing and work in the farm-yard. When he has his land operations completed, he has more free time for this other work.

The man who invented the hydraulic system in connection with mechanised farming did more, in my opinion, for the agricultural community than all the Ministers for Agriculture in the world put together. I am not sure who is the inventor of it, but its benefits will be a millionfold for agricultural producers. The old type of tractor, trailing the agricultural implements behind it, could not properly do farm work on headlands. There was a difficulty when it met with any sort of obstruction. The hydraulic system which is now being worked on most tractors has entirely altered that situation. The operator of the presentday tractor, if he smashes any implement in the course of his work, would do the same if he were working with a team of horses.

I see a great future for mechanised farming. The Minister for Agriculture has said that if a man has not the means to buy one of these expensive machines there is a way of overcoming that difficulty. There are very few small or middle-class farmers who could afford to pay £375 for a tractor, £50 for a plough to work with it, £80 to £90 for a mower, almost £50 for a harrow, £70 for any kind of disc harrow and maybe £50 for a trailer. In fact, it would take almost £1,000 for a man to purchase that amount of machinery. I am glad to say, however, that a scheme has been introduced to enable farmers to overcome that difficulty. You will get, in most areas, young enterprising men who are prepared to invest money in that type of machinery and to hire it out at a reasonable charge to their neighbours. I have experience of that myself. That system can bring mechanised farming into the smallest holdings and into the smallest fields at a reasonable cost to the farmer who employs it and at a profit to himself. He has the assurance that the work is well and swiftly done. There is no objection from the people who hire out these tractors and machinery to do this mechanised farming. They could never hope to purchase it themselves. That system is working quite well. Deputy Dunne has quite rightly pointed out that there is no cause for anxiety in relation to unemployment as a result of mechanisation. If people are laid off agricultural work it will not be because of mechanisation. A machine is the servant of the worker rather than his boss and mechanisation of agriculture must bring lasting benefits to the country as a whole.

It will reduce the number of horses.

It may reduce the number of horses. Let me point out in that connection that a horse deprives a farmer of as much food as would feed two fat cattle or two milch cows. It is much more profitable for the farmer to feed something that he can turn into cash at the end of the year. In most cases a small farmer with ten, 15 or 20 acres of land will only use his horse for two or three months in the year. I made inquiries in my parish and I find that in it and an adjoining parish over 28 tractors have been brought in in the past 12 months. The possibility is that that number will increase in the coming year. I think mechanisation will eventually oust the horse even on the small farms.

It is admitted that there has been a drop in the beet acreage west of the Shannon. That is unfortunate, particularly when one remembers that beet is a cash crop for which the farmer has a guaranteed market at a fixed price. It is an important crop from the point of view of rotation, because it is one root crop which goes down deep into the soil and leaves the land as fertile after harvesting as it was before the crop went in. One of the difficulties with regard to the harvesting of beet is the fact that the farmer must have it ready on a specific date. Whether the weather be good or bad, the beet must be ready for the lorry on the day on which the lorry comes to collect it. Every farmer in the particular area must be ready. The beet must be pulled, crowned and piled on the roadway irrespective of whether the weather is good or bad. In order to have it ready, the farmer may be compelled to work day after day for perhaps a fortnight in pouring rain. It is not so many years since I worked at beet harvesting for as long as 14 days at a stretch in pouring wet weather, and, in order to have the crop ready, it was usual for the farmers to join together in a kind of co-operative society for the purpose of assisting each other in the harvesting of the beet. I know that it is not the fault of the factory. The beet must be collected systematically. If that were not done there would be dislocation in the industry. I am merely pointing out some of the drawbacks at the present moment.

The smallest farmer can grow an acre or two of beet. It is a crop which will bring him in as much as or more than any other acre he tills. I know that we have produced very good beet in the west with a high sugar content. The farmer's only grievance is the time of the year at which it must be harvested. It does seem rather strange that with a guaranteed market we cannot produce enough even for our own needs. One must remember, however, that it is very difficult to get labour, and has been for some time past. Mechanisation is coming to the rescue. The root cappers on the market do a very good job of work, and they have taken a lot of the drudgery away. The weather is the problem all the time; we have no control over that.

The farm improvement scheme was introduced by the Fianna Fáil Government. The scheme was postponed, but it is now in operation, and has been very successful. I, think some effort should be made to have a planned system of out-offices. Houses erected over the past 30 years have been erected according to plan. The same is not true of our farm buildings. They are flung together, here, there and everywhere. I understand that the Department is now giving some attention to that particular aspect of farm improvements, and some effort is being made to have a proper plan. I think that is a good thing. They are not paying the grants as soon as they should, but there may be reasons for that. A farmer who intends to build out-offices within six months may find he has not completed them, and may apply for permission, directly to the Department or through his local representative, asking for another six months to complete the building. That upsets the routine of the Department, and up to a certain extent we cannot blame them for slowness in paying all grants. However, when a report is sent by the inspector that a building has been completed definitely and finally sanctioned, payment should be made quickly. I understand an effort will be made to do that.

The present policy pursued by the Minister is a good one. I like to see an increase in every phase of agricultural output and the Minister's figures show that increase. I want to see some security for the farmers. I am sorry the Minister is not in the House at the moment, as I would like to ask him to live up to his statement regarding the 11-months' system and if it is not meeting with his satisfaction, as he has admitted, it is his duty to do something about it.

Major de Valera

This debate has been largely, as it should be, on the basis of technical or semi-technical discussion on agricultural policy or on the general basis of normal economics. On neither of these bases do I feel competent to enter into this discussion but there is one aspect which has not been adequately covered, the aspect of the repercussion of the Minister's policy on the community as a whole, with particular reference to the present-day situation. The very fact that agriculture is regarded as the dominant feature of our community life tends to have it treated in a certain isolation, as one thing by itself because of its very importance. It is nevertheless tied up with other essential features of the community's life. The farmer and the agricultural labourer primarily concerned in this Estimate, as well as others in towns and elsewhere, can be catered for adequately only by taking all these elements into account.

There exists a particular situation at present and there are questions that arise in it for our people, one of which is the feeding of the people in time of emergency. There is another aspect, not related to that, which can be treated either on an emergency or a peace-time basis. It is the consumers' end, the impact of agriculture on the cost of living through the price or the availability of foodstuffs produced at home. I do not intend to enter into that now as there are difficult problems of balance involved and exhaustively or fairly to deal with them would be beyond my capabilities or my information at the moment.

Very few people are satisfied that we are going infallibly into an era of peace or that it is justifiable to work only on the hypothesis of peace and to discuss our economics—and particularly the economics of agricultural production—purely on the basis that we are entering a period of peace something similar to what obtained in the interval between the two last wars. When people talk about markets, production and other matters frequently introduced into these debates, there seems to be impliedly behind it the assumption that people are working on a hypothesis of peace. The Taoiseach himself has accepted that hypothesis—and consequently that they are either consciously or unconsciously coloured by the experiences of these particular days and they interpret the lessons of these days in a particular way and seek to prophesy for the future. That may be all very well but before you are justified in doing that you have to ask yourself what is the justification for working on that hypothesis. As far away as two years ago there were people in this House and outside it, a minority at first, who raised a question mark whether it was justifiable in agriculture or elsewhere to base oneself completely on the hypothesis that we were going into a peaceful era and that the ordinary normal—whatever they may be—commercial laws will operate without the shadow of force or conflict over them. As the years have gone on confidence in that approach has been lessening instead of increasing. The events of the last two years warrant a less optimistic view but I want to be very careful, particularly in view of the news at the moment, not to suggest a scare or in any way magnify the dangers of the present situation. I want to proceed purely on the basis that the situation is such that we cannot ignore the possibility of an emergency comparable to the last one, in which we were very fortunate, or even worse. We must make allowance for an emergency.

How proximate it is, how probable it is, how little or how great the danger is are matters upon which many will come to a different conclusion. All of us must agree that there is some probability. I would urge that we cannot ignore the dangers and that the prudent and proper thing for us would be to prepare for such an emergency.

A fundamental and basic factor in that preparation is the production of food and the organisation of our food resources so that our people can live through and survive a crisis. That, in turn, is a question of agriculture since it is from the land and those who work the land that that food must come.

Consequently, in what I might call the general defence problem, which we have in company with practically every country in the world, the question of food production is basic and of first priority. It is of first priority even from the point of view of surviving as a community, whether we are involved in war or not. Whether we are actually involved, whether we are positively isolated or whether merely isolated through difficulties of communication, difficulties of supply or anything else, the question of adequate food supplies is of importance in order to enable our people to survive as a political unit. Secondly, the provision of adequate food supplies, quite apart from the desirability of safeguarding our people from famine, is one of the big things that we can do to secure for ourselves some freedom of choice if a crisis should come. It is obviously desirable, no matter how sympathies may lie, that a people such as we, a small people, should be in a position to exercise some freedom of choice, that the Government of the day, representing such a people, should be in a position to take decisions in which the interests of the people will be adequately taken into account. In order that the Government should be in such a position, the first essential is that they should have no worries about the food supply of the people. We all know that the quickest and most effective way to dictate to anybody is to starve him. Certainly the most effective way in which you can dictate the course of action that any man or people will take is through starvation.

Quite apart from the question of famine, the question of adequate food supplies, therefore, is important from the point of view of enabling the Government of the day to be in a position to make reasonable decisions without fear of the terror or dictation that an impending famine may hold for them. That is the second important reason why we should consider this matter in relation to this Estimate.

Thirdly, there is this important point which has not been adverted to and which perhaps I might be permitted to mention now. Many people have voiced various views as to the course we should take in such a contingency, just as in the last emergency people voiced different views as to what course should be taken, but the fundamental thing is that for our own well-being here it is important that we have adequate food supplies if such a contingency should arise. From the point of view of people who are not friendly to you, the fact that you have adequate food supplies is a deterrent to them from attempting to interfere with you or from interfering with such supplies as you may have. From the point of view of your friends also, it is important that you yourself have such food supplies and are so organised in that essential sense that you are not going to be a liability. No matter what approach you have to the problem—the only way we should approach it is from our own point of view because, of course, charity begins at home—from the point of view of our people considered by themselves, and from the point of view of the repercussions on people who might be hostile to you, it is important for you to be in an independent position. Again, from the point of view of people who might be friendly to you it is equally important that these supplies should be available.

These are rather lengthy preliminaries, but a reasonable approach to this matter is important. Supposing such a situation should come, let us visualise what we have to face. I am not going to suggest that it will inevitably come; it may come within five years or at any time. If it does come, we have the lessons of the last emergency. Adequate stocks and adequate supplies of cereals strike one as being the first problem which the Minister may have to face in that regard.

During the last war, some preparation was made towards developing an agricultural economy here that would be favourable for the production of cereals under emergency conditions. I frankly admit that most of the development that went on in that regard—wheat, beet and all the things that the Minister condemned at that time—was not brought about in those days, prior to the war, primarily with a view to the emergency that was to come. I recognise that that policy was embarked upon because it was felt by the people in power as being the best policy for the country. That policy the present Minister opposed violently. The point I want to make is that when the emergency did come, that policy had its beneficial results for the community but even then, when it was found necessary under emergency conditions to increase the production of cereals, certain difficulties arose, for instance, from the fact that there was some decrease in root crop production at the same time. That brings one to consider the necessity of arranging for the production under such conditions of both root crops and cereals, not only for feeding humans but for feeding animals. I am not going into the technical details of that because, if I were to do so, I would certainly walk into a line of country with which I am not at all familiar but merely as the man in the street I should like to ask this question. Supposing we have to face an emergency within a particular time—I am not asking the Minister's opinion as to whether one is going to come or not; I think he voiced his opinion some time ago that there probably would not be one, but I want him to reply now on the basis that I, for one, think it is necessary to make some provision for one—if an emergency should come within any foreseeable time, are we in a position to organise the production of the cereals and the root crops that will at least leave us in the position we were in during the last emergency? That question has to be examined in relation to the possibility that the same supplies from overseas may not be as readily available as before.

If it was decided to increase the number of acres under cereals, if such a thing was found to be desirable, the results would not show themselves until the harvest of 1951. That brings up the question of storage, and how much storage we have in hand at any particular time. I think that during the last war the storage for grain and other commodities was deficient. We should at least learn that lesson, and see that it does not happen again.

The next criticism I have to make, and I mean it in all sobriety, is that the Minister's policy—I would be glad if he would correct me if I am wrong in the matter—has been based, during the last two years, on the old Fine Gael policy of the cattle trade; that if all goes well with regard to the cattle trade then he is quite satisfied. Everybody will admit that, particularly in a time when prices are favourable, there is something to be said for such a policy.

Would the Deputy substitute live stock and live-stock products for cattle?

Major de Valera

I will.

Then that is correct.

Major de Valera

Even so, the Minister will find that I am approaching this matter from a particular angle I am not talking about agriculture generally in the strict normal sense, because I do not feel that I am competent to do so, but I am talking about it from the point of view of an emergency. The difficulty I see about simply concentrating on the live-stock aspect of agriculture is that if you do not balance it on the other side to the extent at any rate where you can feed your people and your animals, you are not only completely dependent on one market for your live stock, that is the £ s.d. side, but you also become critically dependent on outside sources for essential supplies of food for your people and your animals. That is a situation which is extremely dangerous in any condition of emergency. It is dangerous from the point of view of your people's food supply, and a greater danger still from the point of view of your whole economy if you are completely at the mercy of an outside agency or in a position of being dictated to in regard to food supplies.

In the past that was the justified criticism of the old Fine Gael policy in that regard and one feels that the present Minister is following on that policy. It seems to me from my limited knowledge that it is a dangerous policy. There is sufficient uncertainty in the present situation of the world to warrant a balanced economy with a bias towards producing such foodstuffs as we can at home and we should balance our economy, even at a cost, in that particular way. There is sufficient urgency to warrant us in attending to our storage position and in seeing that a situation such as occurred in the last emergency will not occur again where we might not get the same satisfactory opportunities as we got in the past.

There are a couple of other matters. One is the question of fertilisers. I do not know how far the Minister will have responsibility in that matter. I know what he has announced in that regard, but the point I want to make is that we are completely dependent on outside supplies for fertilisers. At least we should see that we have adequate reserve stocks for an emergency and I think we would be justified in creating them. I had occasion elsewhere to examine the statistics in that regard and I found that in phosphates a certain tonnage came in before the last war. The figure, 80,000, sticks in my mind, but I am not certain what tonnage was imported. Just before the war that fertiliser import was pushed up and rose before the war, obviously in anticipation by the Department concerned of the war, and the desire to get supplies. But, then, in 1942 there was a sudden drop of imports to zero and I understand that a cargo was lost. It was anticipated North African supplies would be cut out and there were substantial purchases in the American market at prohibitive prices. The imports rose after 1942, but they did not reach normality until 1947 or 1948. In the meantime, there were phosphates available in County Clare, but which, notwithstanding the efforts of the Government, and a private producer, were never sufficient to balance the loss caused by the inability to get supplies from outside. There is a lesson to be learned there. The lesson is simply (a) to have reasonable stocks in hand as long as there is a threat, and (b) to make provision for production at home of such fertilisers that might be needed in emergency conditions.

I have urged in another debate that this industry should be set up to manufacture fertilisers, but I do not want to go into that further. In addition to providing for stocks, we should at least have the plans ready to deal with that problem if and when the occasion arises. The question of nitrogenous fertilisers is also important, and again I do not know how far the Minister is responsible in that matter.

Is not the land a good place in which to store phosphates?

Major de Valera

I am not going to quarrel with the Minister on that at all. There is indeed a very strong case for building up the land. I am not joining issue with the Minister on that, but what I say is, if we had a position where we were isolated, it would be desirable that we should not be caught in the position in which we were the last time because the last time was a position from which we barely got through. What I suggest now is that we should never allow the position to arise in which we will be so caught again.

In regard to nitrogenous manures, again, there are possibilities. Just as we have certain phosphate supplies in this country—I am not going into the technical suitability at the moment; there has been a bit of a controversy about it—the raw material would be available in time of emergency. I have urged on the Minister for Industry and Commerce the need for setting up a basic industry here, namely, the production of the basic chemicals like nitrate and sulphate ammonia. That is a process that could be worked here if you had electric power and plant. Whatever the case which I have already made for that industry in normal peacetime, from the point of view of an emergency situation, it is of great importance.

Even if it cannot be prosecuted and developed in a pre-emergency stage, at least we should be in a position to get going with it and to achieve production in that regard should an emergency break and that, too, means planning—ensuring that essential items of equipment and plant which you will need for that project will be available in the country before emergency breaks so that your plans will not break down for lack of them. I mention these for their intrinsic importance from this point of view and also perhaps as part of a suggestion that I have already been trying to bring to bear on other Ministers—the desirability of such an industry which would be a nucleus for a limited chemical industry here.

Has the Deputy ever considered légumes as being one of the most efficient methods of manufacturing nitrogen in this country?

Major de Valera

The Minister is referring to the fixation of nitrogen by such things as beans, and so forth, in the ground.

Clover and so forth.

Major de Valera

I am neither a technical agriculturist nor a farmer and I will say frankly that I do not know very much about the subject, if I can claim to know anything about it, but the case I am trying to make goes further. I understand from the last emergency that such natural methods of dealing with the soil were not enough. Consequently, no matter what resources you have in the beginning, artificial manures generally are necessary.

I am sorry that Deputy Commons is not now in the House because I must confess that I was rather interested in his remarks on mechanisation in agriculture. Again, I am not going to go into that vexed question. Perhaps I should say that I am one of those who are rather inclined to favour mechanisation wherever it can be effectively applied but that is not the aspect of the story to which I want to come. It is this: that it is quite true and it is an impressive point to one listening to it as I was earlier to say, as the Deputy said, that if you have a tractor working as against horses it is leaving the feeding of these horses available for the feeding of other animals.

In other words, instead of using some of your land and some of your effort for your motive power on the farm you have it all for its primary purpose and the argument that the tractor has advantages in that regard in times of unlimited supplies of fuel would go very far with me, anyway. On the other hand, we have to consider what, if the figures given by that Deputy are correct, is going to be an important problem to the Minister for Agriculture, namely, the question of fuel oil storage. Deputy Commons gave figures of 28 tractors in two parishes within a year, I think. The Minister will know how far mechanisation is becoming an important feature in agriculture. I think it is inevitable that it probably will. But if it is, it raises two further problems for the Minister in regard to a possible emergency situation—the provision of implements and spare parts. During the last emergency, as unmechanised as we were before it and during it, the problem of agricultural implements was one that assumed importance as the war wore on. In proportion as you mechanise the industry and rely on the products of the factory, steelworks and so forth, in that proportion will that problem magnify. Therefore, the Minister in considering this possible emergency situation has the question of spare parts, the replacement of implements and all these kindred problems to consider. That I must also commend to him and it will be one of the very many complex problems he will have to deal with in that regard. Again, for the first time probably in regard to agriculture, the problem of fuel oil—I have mentioned it already—will assume a great importance. The Minister for Agriculture must then be satisfied that this power problem in agriculture is adequately provided for if a time of scarcity should come as it came in the past.

These are only a few of the points. One could practically multiply a lot of them by going into sub-details and even getting new points to deal with. The net is this. What is the Minister's Department, in conjunction with other Departments—because it is a question of co-ordination, largely, as well as individual activity in Departments—doing to prepare us for a possible emergency, whether we are involved or not?

If a serious world crisis broke out, anything in the nature of hostilities involving the western hemisphere, an emergency situation will be here whether we are involved or not. We, at least, have this fortunate factor in our favour, that our approach to the basic problems involved in that situation will be the same for us whether we are involved or not. On any approach our people will have to be fed; we will have to be organised; our agriculture must be organised to keep life going and enable us to survive as a community. It is also desirable that we should look to it from the point of view of putting the Government in the position of taking a decision with some freedom of choice open to them. That is the net point I want to make.

I would like to know from the Minister whether he has considered what Switzerland has done recently. It is a rather ominous thing to find the Swiss making provision about food rationing and laying in stocks of food. I am sure the Minister is aware of that. If the situation is serious enough for Switzerland it may be serious enough for us to consider what we should do.

Leaving that aspect of the subject, there is one matter which has been brought to my notice and which I prefer to put to the Minister in the form of a question. As my information is meagre, I would be glad if he would give us some information. It has been mentioned to me that the Minister has employed in his Department or has engaged in his Department some person or persons in the nature either of organisers or efficiency experts or something of that nature. Perhaps the Minister will give us details if there are any such persons employed. It has been suggested that such persons have complete access to any information or any activity in the Minister's Department from top to bottom. It has also been suggested that the particular person in question—person or persons —is not an Irish national. I am not in the position to know, and perhaps the Minister will tell us what is the position in that regard.

The Minister may very well feel that he would be entitled to have the affairs of his Department examined and get to the maximum pitch of organisation and efficiency. With such a desire few people can quarrel. On the other hand, it is said that the persons concerned are not nationals of this country, and, if they are not, and if they have the wide powers of securing information and the wide access that it is alleged they have in this country, it means there are certain non-nationals who have access to information which even elected Deputies have not.

Is it the Deputy's apprehension that they have access to confidential files and papers?

Major de Valera

Yes, that is my information. Is it so?

Oh, gracious no.

Major de Valera

If that is so, I am very glad to hear it.

Oh, no, not at all.

Major de Valera

Perhaps that would be the only reason I should raise the matter at all, because I do think it is serious that if there are any persons, efficiency experts or other persons, particularly if they are nonnationals, who have access to all files and documents, secret or confidential or otherwise in the Department, the Minister might well reconsider that, or inform the House of the position.

I think if the Deputy asks his colleagues of ministerial experience they will tell him that confidential files are never open to an officer of the Department below a certain high rank.

Major de Valera

I understand that.

And no officer of these efficiency experts would approximate to the rank of an official who would have access to the files—a high ranking official.

Major de Valera

I will ask the Minister to deal with that point when he is replying, if he can remember it amongst the various things about which he has been asked. The Minister asked, when Deputy Childers was speaking, about some figures and, as I understood Deputy Childers, the figures which were referred to are these. On 15th February, 1950, the Parliamentary Secretary answered Deputy Allen. It is in Volume 119 of the Parliamentary Debates, the unrevised edition. There are figures there showing the total number of males employed in agriculture. The question related to male agricultural workers, but the answer related to the total number of males employed in agriculture for a number of years up to 1948. On 2nd May last the number was given at 452,000 odd. It is in column 1418. The net result of these figures which, I think, Deputy Childers was referring to, was that in 1947 the total number of males employed on the land was 507,000; in 1948, the number was 499,000 and in 1949 the number of 452,000. If you do some subtraction there you get the figure Deputy Childers referred to.

There are a number of matters which the Minister's Department would be involved in and I am tempted to refer to them now, by reason of the fact that the Minister for External Affairs is at the moment sitting beside the Minister for Agriculture. People in the City of Dublin have been worried about the cost of living in so far as foodstuffs are concerned, and the Minister for External Affairs has recently, practically at the same time as the Government Information Bureau issued a statement on the cost of living, come out with some remarks on the subject. I realise there are problems of balance there, and I am tempted to go into it, now that the two Ministers are together. I ask them: "Can you get of one mind and do something?" and I will leave it at that.

We have to balance our agricultural economy. We will have to go back somewhat, I think, to the production of foodstuffs, apart from the production of live stock, so as to ensure adequate supplies for humans and animals. That balanced economy has been justified in peace and in emergency conditions in the past. There appears to be none other open to us. Time is slipping, and we will have to tackle this problem a little bit more urgently than we have been doing. There is a lot of talk about compulsion and no compulsion. It seems to me that is not a matter in issue at the moment. It is more a question of governmental encouragement and it is a question of what are the results that are flowing from Government policy.

Rightly or wrongly, one feels that much of the country is uncertain and that some of the depressing features in the present picture are due to uncertainly, to the feeling that one Minister is pressing or saying one thing in a half-hearted way while another Minister is saying something else, and the feeling that the Government is not as energetic along any particular line as it might be, and the feeling also that we are just drifting where time is being lost and that the time has come now—it came some time ago— when energetic action along some definite positive line is necessary. As far as this debate is concerned, I think I will leave it at that.

I do not propose to say very much on this Estimate which has been so long under discussion. I do feel depressed at hearing all that has been said about the farmers and their helplessness, with all the appeals that were made to the Minister for Agriculture to do things for them. There is one appeal that I would make to the farmers, and it is that they should make more use of the co-operative movement. I believe that the future belongs to the Party or Government which fully embraces the principle of co-operation. I feel that the farming community is not making as much use of the co-operative movement as it should. We talk about the cost of living, which is undoubtedly a very serious matter at the moment, but, in regard to the masses of our people, I also feel that they are not fully conscious of the exploitation that is taking place amongst them by middlemen. I have heard a good deal said here about the amount of money spent on farms and on what the farmers are getting for their produce and on what they are getting from the State. I always feel that if there is any section of the people which deserves consideration it is that section which produces food for the nation.

I heard the Minister say some time ago that milk production had increased, and that we had a surplus of it. Can the Minister tell me what is the consumption of milk per head of the population? I also heard him say some time ago that people were not buying their ration of butter—eight ounces. I suggest to him, from the knowledge that I have, that the reason why the masses of the people are not buying the ration is because they have not the means to do so. If there is anything necessary in this country at the moment it is, in my opinion, a more equitable distribution of the income of the nation. When I think of the 50,000 or 55,000 unemployed who are living on from 9/- to 16/- a week for single men, and of 27/6 for a man and his wife, I ask myself, how can anyone seriously suggest that people in that position can buy eight ounces of butter, which is the amount of the ration, or how can they buy eggs or anything else for themselves and their families since they are solely dependent on unemployment assistance or unemployment benefit. Take the old age pensioner with 17/6 a week. What purchasing power has that sum nowadays? What I suggest to both sides of the House is that what they should concentrate their minds upon is bringing down the cost of living, and the cost of every article that is produced and manufactured here.

The Minister looks at me in surprise. Could the Minister tell me what percentage is taken on farm products from the time the farmer produces them until they reach the consumer's table? What percentage is taken by the middlemen who handle them? Has the Minister any evidence to show us what is the cost of distribution of what we produce?

What function has the Minister for Agriculture in that respect?

I do not know.

The cost of food has come down. Clothes and rent put up the cost.

The cost of bacon has not come down. I have heard those in my own household complain recently about the cost of living. I think they have very good reason for the complaint they make. I should like to devote a little time to the question of the consumption of milk in this country. I noticed recently that the production of milk on farms in England and Wales last March amounted to 143,000,000 gallons. I am glad to know that milk production has increased here, but I am not satisfied that the consumption of milk amongst our people is what it should be.

Does the Deputy mean the city population?

I am talking of the people of the country as a whole. Are they, on the average, consuming three-quarters of a pint of milk each per day? I believe they are not. If we were to pay £1,000,000 to subsidise the consumption of this most valuable food I think it would be a good investment. It surely would be a good thing to provide milk for our children so that they would grow up healthy and strong, as well as for the people generally.

There has been a reference to the wages paid to agricultural workers. We talk about keeping the people on the land. What is the use of talking about that unless we give them a better status than they have at the moment? The fact is that the agricultural worker, who is engaged in producing the food of the nation, cannot to-day receive more than 63/- per week for a 56-hour week. The Minister will probably say to me: "That is not my affair".

No. That is the minimum wage.

When we are dealing with agriculture and talking about land we cannot separate one from the other. If we want to keep people on the land we must make that occupation more attractive than it is. Let me say that I am not one bit alarmed about what the farmers are getting or are likely to get, when I read in a Sunday paper of a lady going into a fashionable shop in Dublin and buying a hat for 40 guineas to attend a race meeting. I ask myself, where is she going to get the 40 guineas for that hat? Where is that money to come from to add to the glare and glitter of life in the City of Dublin and of other places? I am satisfied that the money was not found on a racecourse or in any of the first-class hotels in Dublin. It could only be found from the people who are working in fields and in factories or in mines to give those people a luxurious life. Therefore, if the Minister is to set himself to deal effectively with the consumption of milk and butter, he will have to advocate a more equitable distribution of the wealth of the country and of the national income. I am satisfied that the masses of our people are not able to purchase the milk, the butter or the eggs which are being produced, because of their lack of purchasing power. I do not think it is necessary to stress that further. Undoubtedly I think it is a shame and hardly fair to the people that so much valuable time should have been wasted here during the past few weeks by bringing in irrelevant matters on an Estimate for what is the most important industry in the country.

They are eating more butter and drinking more milk than was ever eaten or drunk in this country since Brian Boru fell on the battlefield at Clontarf.

They would drink more and eat more if they had the purchasing power to buy it. I am quite satisfied of that. Surely we are not going to adopt the standards of long ago as proper for our agricultural community to-day. The bacon producers and consumers will have to be protected. Those who control the market will have to be dealt with more effectively than they have been dealt with so far by the present Government.

Agriculture is the most important Vote coming before this House. I am particularly interested in one matter which concerns the people of the Gaeltacht and the congested areas. I am interested in the glasshouse scheme for the growing of tomatoes and other produce. That scheme was inaugurated by Fianna Fáil a few years ago. The people in Donegal and in County Galway are not satisfied with the interest the present Minister has so far displayed in that scheme and with the assistance he has seen fit to give the scheme. The Minister knows the Donegal and Galway Gaeltacht very well. He must know how difficult it is to establish industries there for the benefit of the people. Men with capital do not want to establish factories in the backward areas of Donegal, Galway and the West generally. They will not build factories there so long as they are permitted to build them in and around Dublin and the other large centres of population. We have very few industries in the congested areas. For centuries past the eyes of the people in these areas have turned to Glasgow, Liverpool, London and the other big industrial cities across the water rather than to our own principal cities and towns. The exodus from the Gaeltacht will continue so long as the present position obtains. The glasshouse scheme was designed to keep the young people at home and to give them a way of living so that they might be able to maintain themselves in some degree of comfort in their own homeland. It is very desirable that that should be done.

We have had debate after debate on the Gaeltacht, the language, Gaelic culture and so on. Unless some concreate steps are taken the Gaeltacht, as has been said so often here, is doomed. People cannot survive without employment. They must have the wherewithal to carry on their homes. Unless industries are developed with the assistance of a native Government the outlook is a very poor one. The glasshouse scheme was not an exotic scheme. Private individuals have successfully carried on glasshouse cultivation for many years. I think that if this scheme had the backing of the Minister and his Department it would be a success. It could be developed and expanded. It has been proved that an acre of land under glass will yield 40 tons of produce. The same area in the open, because of the adverse weather conditions to which we are accustomed, will only yield something in the neighbourhood of two or three tons. If the Minister accepts that, here then is a scheme designed to increase production in an area where production has always been very low.

Some Deputies have referred to the high price demanded by the Irish growers for tomatoes. If the Irish grower is given a reasonable measure of protection, such as is accorded to other Irish industries, he will not be difficult to please so far as price is concerned. He will be satisfied with a reasonable price if he is assured of a market. Nobody objects to the Minister allowing the importation of tomatoes at a time when our own growers are unable to meet the demand. When our own growers can meet the demand the importation of foreign tomatoes should be prohibited. That is not an unreasonable request. It is one that is made by the biggest industrialists here.

Hear, hear!

It is one that should meet with the sympathy and approval of the Minister. The Minister may be very anxious to give the poor of Dublin cheap tomatoes. Carrying that argument to its logical conclusion, one can equally well argue that if we import shirts from Japan we can give the people the best of shirts at 1/11 or 2/- each; we can give them cheap boots and shoes from Czecho-Slovakia and cheap clothing from other parts of the world. I make the case that this industry established in the Gaeltacht, where we have so few, deserves the consideration and sympathy of the Government just as much as the boot and shoe industry, the clothing industry or any other industry established under the aegis of Government.

They have not any complaint, have they?

I am coming to the complaint. As far as I can ascertain, last year the average price paid for tomatoes in Donegal was 3½d. per lb. I think that is a scandalous price to pay for such a very fine commodity. I maintain that there is no comparison between the homegrown tomato and the imported tomato. If the Minister and the Government are anxious to give cheap tomatoes to the people of Dublin and elsewhere, they should take into consideration the quality of the fruit. One lb. of Irish tomatoes is equal to 7 lb. of the stuff that is imported in such very bad condition and sold at ¼ and ? per lb. The livelihood of those who were driven away on to the West coast of Ireland is at stake. Their future is at stake unless industries, such as the tomato-growing industry, are developed and helped.

If the condition of affairs that has obtained now for some years in the Gaeltacht and the congested areas is allowed to continue, it will be only a matter of years until there will be no necessity to raise the question of the Gaeltacht here at all because there will be no Gaeltacht left. The growers there ask that measure of protection from the Minister. They say that they are working under bigger difficulties than those who have been in this business for hundreds of years. It is a young industry, so far as they are concerned and it should be helped. As the Minister is aware, in the Donegal Gaeltacht, the growers have to haul water over long distances and until a proper water supply is made available, as probably it will be, it is impossible to offer tomatoes at a very low price. I do not want to labour this question, but I would again ask the Minister to give it his personal attention, sympathy and co-operation. I can assure him that the people of the Gaeltacht will do the rest. This is a scheme that will help production there, help to keep our people at home in comfort and to raise their standard of living, a scheme that can be expanded over the various congested areas if we find it is a success. Surely that request coming to the Minister for Agriculture in an Irish Government should not fall on deaf ears.

I shall be very brief. I appreciate the work carried out under the schemes initiated by the Minister and the Government, but there are some difficulties associated with portion of these schemes to which I should like to draw the Minister's attention. So far as the land rehabilitation scheme is concerned, as it operates in our district, the inspectors concerned are not at all co-operating as they should with the small farmers. The farmers there are of opinion that the scheme as it is advertised and operated to suit other counties should be adjusted to fit in with their economy and with local conditions. It is not working out too well at present, and I have certain complaints to make about it. I should like the Minister to examine the matter and, if necessary, instruct these inspectors to facilitate the people in the area I represent. For instance, the small farmers require a certain type of development, and to avail of a section of this scheme, but to do so would entail the carrying through of the scheme in its entirety, and the inspectors concerned insist on these small farmers going on with the whole scheme. I, on their behalf, would like the Minister to examine that aspect of the matter. It would be a serious matter for us if the scheme is not carried out as the Minister and the Government would like to see it carried out. At the moment it is not being carried out as originally intended.

Another question that arises under the heading of the land rehabilitation scheme is that of water supplies to farmers. I, as a member of a local authority, would like the Minister to consider the question of co-operation with local authorities in that regard. Money is being provided up to a maximum of £100 in each case for farmers who will avail of that scheme. In some of these areas, the local authority would, in the normal course, be interested in carrying through these schemes, and I have been asked to see if the Minister would consider the advisability of co-operation with the local authorities in that regard.

Another matter which I have been asked to bring to the attention of the Minister is that merchants in my district have applied on various occasions for licences to enable them to import root and vegetable seeds. They have been informed that, under an Emergency Powers Order put through in 1943, only certain people in this country can import these seeds. I think it is not right to deprive local merchants of an opportunity to import root and vegetable seeds. It seems to me that four or five firms have a monopoly of that end of the business. I think it is time that the position should be reviewed and some action taken in regard to it.

I should also like to bring to the notice of the Minister the position of men in charge of rural improvement schemes and other schemes. They have been employed in that capacity for a number of years, and I am informed that they are denied proper travelling expenses and also that they are still employed in a temporary capacity. They have, on the average, been in the employment of the Department for ten years, and even though they have applied on various occasions, through their organisation and other channels, they have been denied rights enjoyed by their colleagues engaged on other work carried out by the same Department. I think that there is a case there for immediate consideration by the Minister.

Another point which I should like to put to the Minister is that the Agricultural Credit Corporation, so far as I can see in any case, is not of very much assistance to farmers. I have had experience in the past 12 months of cases where the Agricultural Credit Corporation refused bona fide applications. I could never understand why they have refused facilities to the farmers I have in mind. I would go so far as to suggest that if it is said that the Agricultural Credit Corporation is an autonomous body over which we have no control, it should, by legislation, be made amenable——

The Deputy may not, on Estimates, advocate legislation.

I accept your ruling, Sir, but I am anxious to question these decisions of the Agricultural Credit Corporation in regard to the people to whom I have referred. I move to report progress.

Progress reported; the Committee to sit again later.
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